ShriKant Vashishtha

First Look At Maven 3

ShriKant Vashishtha · December 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment

After hearing a lot of good things about upcoming Maven 3 but not getting any stable release, I thought I should give it a try with its early snapshot. So I downloaded it from its svn repo. As I was a bit impatient, without looking at instructions I built it using ANT. Later I realized that I could also do it using existing version of maven. After building it, I thought I should give it a try on my existing project and here are a few observations.

Maven 3 has been designed to be backward compatible and it worked nicely for my project with minor hicups.
Initially I thought it’s my misconception, but guys, here’s a good news – it’s much faster than Maven 2.
It’s more verbose (for better) and provides information (relevant plugin and associated goal) on each step being executed
It doesn’t seem to like to redundant information anymore. I had duplicate dependency in my pom.xml which used to work in Maven 2. Maven 3 doesn’t allow it.
While working with it, I simply loved its feature of restartability. In Maven 2, if your test case fails, you have to start all over again. In Maven 3, you can restart from where you left after fixing the test which (I know you already figured out) is a great time saver. Here is an example:
[ERROR] After correcting the problems, you can resume the build with the command [ERROR] mvn <goals> -rf :elmar-import-incr

Knowledge Sharing Between Distributed Teams

ShriKant Vashishtha · June 2, 2009 · Leave a Comment

One of the key USPs of pair-programming is – it provides value which is more than simple typing. That includes ACTIVE participation in code-review, knowledge sharing on continual basis, frequent design discussions with minimal distractions etc. If you primarily focus on knowledge sharing, pair-programming essentially provides true form of knowledge sharing as instead of looking at some bulky heartless documents you sit together with a person who has already worked on the subject and can have conversations and design discussions.

Augmented Distributed Agile Teams – The Need of Local Retrospective

ShriKant Vashishtha · May 21, 2009 · 1 Comment

World is becoming a global village especially in form of communication and the dissemination of information. In context of current economic turmoil and lack of enough trained software professionals locally, distributed Agile is becoming a norm for software project execution.

Earlier, most of the times, entire distributed software project used to be executed completely at offshore because of time-zone differences and communication issues. Now because of communication revolution, you see a new trend where software companies like to extend their teams (augmented Agile teams) with different vendors. Recently while working in such a project from a distributed location, we realized the need of local retrospective.

Refactoring Flex application from existing Adobe AIR codebase

ShriKant Vashishtha · March 2, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Adobe AIR is a great technology to provide platform-independent desktop RIA applications. Gone are the days when Windows operating system used to be ubiquitous in desktop market. That’s the reason why Adobe AIR is considered as the future of desktop applications. Desktop applications are here to stay as they come with the power of providing rich features in efficient/optimal way compared to browser mode.

Getting through Popup Blockers with window.open() in Flex

ShriKant Vashishtha · January 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

It was a few years back when I last worked with Javascript. Things have changed significantly in between and one of the things which we people always like is the introduction of popup-blockers in browser world. I hope you remember those old days when it was a nuisance to close all those uninvited windows. Now we are living in a relatively peaceful world. But sometimes we also want to open new windows for legitimate reasons. So when I had a task to open a new browser window on button-click, I discovered the problems posed by popup-blockers. The interesting part is – window.open() behavior can be different for different browsers and popup-blockers.