Ben's Blog

The Grails JMS plugin and Tibco EMS

This week, work asked me to build an admin tool that could listen in on the messages of a jms topic, record them and output them in a web page.

I thought Grails with the help of the wonderful JMS plugin had the potential to deliver exactly what I needed.

The examples were great, but didn't deal with EMS, only activeMQ, Googling came up with nothing. So, I thought I'd make a note of how I finally got it working with Tibco.

Firstly, I followed the JMS plugin notes here, then I grabbed a copy of tibjms.jar and placed it in the grails app lib directory.

Finally, I placed the following code in resources.groovy:

beans = {
        connectionFactory(com.tibco.tibjms.TibjmsConnectionFactory) {                    
            userName     = 'blah'
            userPassword = 'blah'
            serverUrl    = 'tcp://server1:7019,server2:7019'
        }
}

And Bob is indeed my uncle, I have a grails app talking to a Tibco EMS. I got the messages saved via GORM and used the  scaffolding feature to give me an auto-generated application based around the GORM domain classes. It couldn't have been easier.

Be Broadband - Draytek 2820 Set up.

I recently bought a new wireless modem. The DrayTek Vigor 2820 ADSL monster. It does loads of cool stuff. I bought it to replace my Netgear DG834N, which now and again would stall on me.

Preparing for my Second Retrospective

I've been asked to run a retrospective tomorrow. The retrospective is for a team I used to work with a year ago; so I'll be familiar with the attendees, this will be their first retrospective. I've decided run the hour using in the formula my team often uses to great effect. I will be interested to see how the team reacts to this type of meeting.

A Retrospective based on Agile Values

On Wednesday I ran my first retrospective. I decided to focus on some of the positive values that make up a good team: Simplicity, Feedback, Courage, Respect and Communication. The values came from the second edition of Kent Beck's book: Extreme Programming. I also used another great book Agile Retrospectives to help me out. We only have one copy of the book in the office, more are on order, I plan to buy one personally for myself. Being my first retrospective, I was slightly nervous, the format I chose was a little different from our normal agenda. Some of the methods I wanted to try we hadn't used before in our team. Our iterations are weekly, so we find that a one hour morning retrospective is enough time to disccuss and work through the issues of the last week.

Booting Ubuntu without a monitor, VNC access

I just spent a couple of hours configuring /etc/X11/xorg.conf

I have a small Ubuntu machine in my home configured as a media server. It's currently my music server running squeezecenter. I have had Asterisk running on it, but that's not working at the moment. I've been frustrated that when ever I reboot the computer then two annoying things happen. Firstly, the DNS config settings are lost and I have to reset them. Secondly, due to no monitor, VNC starts up at a resolution of 640x480. I fixed the second issue by reading through this post. I'm about to start looking at the first issue.

info corporate - Desenvolvimento para já

I've been published. The interview I gave a couple of months ago has finally been translated and is now in print. It's in Portuguese and well worth a read.

Embraer e Grupo Semco, aqui no Brasil, e BMW, Philips, Bosch e Toyota, no exterior, são alguns exemplos de empresas que estão de olho na criação de soft- ware através de metodologias ágeis de desenvolvimento, o cha- mado Agile Software Develop- ment. Mas é a equipe Agile do grupo britânico de mídia British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) que é considerada uma das mais efi- cientes do mundo no uso dessa técnica. O modo de trabalho con- siste em produzir programas num prazo que varia de uma a seis se- manas, por meio da constante in- teração entre programadores, clientes e executivos de TI. Ben Coombs, Agile Java developer da BSkyB, fala à Info CORPORATE sobre a aplicação da metodologia nas empresas.

Download inc56_lafora.pdf

My involvement with Agile

I was recently interviewed for a Brazilian IT magazine about my experience with Agile. Here are my notes, I think the article's going to be edited to a shorter piece.