सम्प्रेषण (Sampreshan)

संगच्छध्वं सं वदध्वं सं वो मनांसि जानताम्‌। देवा भागं यथा पूर्वे संजानाना उपासते॥ ऋग्वेद 12/191.4

ShriKant Vashishtha

eclipse-to-maven : Printing Dependency Tree of Eclipse projects or Workspace

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Many a times when you need to understand or optimize the dependency tree in Eclipse projects, it’s simpler to look at .classpath file or at the build path of Eclipse project. However it doesn’t remain practical for a big workspace as .classpath file contains many other things other than <classpathentry/> tags and also you have to open individual .classpath files in different Eclipse projects. Looking at Eclipse buildpath becomes too repetitive and mechanical in a big workspace.

eclipse-to-maven project supports the functionality to print the Eclipse dependency tree in readable format. The steps on how to use this it are mentioned in the README of the project.

Converting Eclipse Workspace to Maven – Why eclipse-to-maven?

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Through this post, I would like to analyse the factors on why to mavenise the existing Eclipse based workspace using eclipse-to-maven project.

Focus on business goals instead of just doing build

ANT is a low level language and requires everything to be created from the scratch. The main focus remains creating build for the project. With Maven, build becomes trivial and you start focusing on bigger goals like enforcing test coverage, static code review with checkstyle and PMD. That too becomes very simple as many of the plugins are already available.

Good opportunity to restructure

Provides a good time to restructure and having a thoughtful analysis on what kind of sources should be placed where. The analysis results in potentially removing cyclic dependencies, identifying the sources which are not used anymore. This in turn results in reducing the build time significantly.

First step towards continuous delivery

In order to be continuous delivery ready, the build has to be single click (virgin machine with just Java in place), continuous integration ready all the time, plugins available to support automated functional testing. Also build should be simple enough to introduce any new small or big build specific change. Maven is a first step towards doing that in any Java based workspace.
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When KISS Backfires

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I started working in software projects when C++ was the only highly popular programming language. There used to be a lot of focus in writing optimal programs or routines. So though the applications were optimal, they suffered from Waterfall mindset of thinking distant future nobody was clear on – “What if…in future…”.

Design patterns and C++ Idioms were new and that led people writing complex programs for the heck of applying patterns in the applications. Some “what if…” used to generate a lot of waste. I still remember a software project which was continuously and consciously designed for internationalized database just because what if we need to setup our company in a country like China. For years a lot of effort and money went into developing and maintaining internationalized datasets. At the end when the need really came, people realized that the same system doesn’t fit in China because the way thing works over there. So a lot of hard work simply became waste.

Agile came and along with that engineering practices Extreme Programming became mainstream. The learnings from Waterfall days gave birth to some principles which made a lot of sense in Agile perspective.

So “Keep It Simple and Stupid (KISS)” made a lot of sense to the developer community which has already seen many overengineered products and a lot of waste coming just because of “what if…” syndrome.

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Nanologs – When Blogs and Tweets Don’t Work

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Twitter promised brevity. People  didn’t have that much time to look at detailed descriptions or articles. At the same time everybody didn’t have that much of articulation skill so that they could write their experiences properly as web pages.

Twitter is a big thing. However it’s becoming the problem  which exactly it was trying to  solve. It’s again information bombardment. You still require data-miners to separate good information from pile of useless tweets.

On daily basis, you read tweets in the hope that you will find some useful info.

Another problem is – though 140 characters length is a boon, sometimes the research of days cannot be expressed in just tweets.
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