S'true

On Flickr and JSON vs JSONP

2011-09-16T17:33:00.001+02:00

I've been playing somewhat with the Flickr API lately since I've been preparing a workshop in introductory jQuery, and the Flickr API is a great example in doing GETs for JSON content. However, the Flickr API returns JSONP instead of JSON by default. A typical response:

jsonFlickrApi({
  "photos": {
    "page": 1,
    "pages": 1033,
    "perpage": 100,
    "total": "103268",
    "photo": [{...}]
  }
})

In order not to confuse my students, I wanted to start using pure JSON, i.e. letting the response be

{
  "photos": {
    "page": 1,
    "pages": 1033,
    "perpage": 100,
    "total": "103268",
    "photo": [{...}]
  }
}

I couldn't find this in the Flickr API docs, which are rather good, but later I found out that you can append &nojsoncallback=1 to the request URL to accomplish the latter response.

On design vs. style

2011-09-02T18:13:00.000+02:00

So, recently I was listening to the Style episode of This Developer's Life, talking about the importance of design. In the beginning, the interviewer talks to a designer working at Microsoft, and it hit me that they, without mentioning it, are talking about the single reason why Apple has fared so well in the marketplace.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
- Steve Jobs

Compare the quote from Steve Jobs above to the Microsoft designer talking about colors in the code surface.

Design isn't visuals, it's the entire user experience. If you're only doing a fair job thinking about how the user will actually use your feature, there's no way the user is going to think your product is good even though you put a lot of thought into the color scheme.

On a Code Kata in Malmö

2011-05-12T09:40:00.001+02:00

Me and Joakim Karlsson are arranging a Code Kata in Malmö. The purpose is to be in "training" mode in order to build knowledge, instead of trying out stuff on a real project. This way we can experiment and reflect on our modelling and designing skills more thoroughly than when we are in a real production code setting.

If you're interested, go to our meetup event page (in Swedish) and sign up!

On Spring MVC running on AppEngine

2011-05-11T16:33:00.002+02:00

I've just published a (modified) version of the Google AppEngine Java tutorial which runs using Spring and Spring MVC. Since it was rather tedious to get everything running as it should, I thought it could be spread to the world.

Go check it out at github! Pull requests are welcome.

On my Scandinavian Developer Conference presentation

2011-04-04T17:08:00.003+02:00

This is the presentation I held on April 4, 2011 at the Scandinavian Developer Conference 2011 in Gothenburg.

Railsify your web development

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On ScanDevConf 2011

2011-03-30T19:45:00.003+02:00

I haven't remembered to note this on this blog (but I hope you've seen it on my Twitter feed), but I'll do a session on Scandinavian Developer Conference, which takes place in Gothenburg April 4-5. My session is called "Railsify your web development". In that session I'll try to explain how to become (almost) as effective in your legacy web app development as when you're doing Ruby on Rails development, by using some of the practices Rails developers use.

I'll make sure I post the presentation from that conference here.

If you read this blog, don't hesitate to come talk to me!

On upgrading Rails from 2.3.5 to Rails 3 (via 2.3.8)

2011-01-21T15:59:00.007+01:00

I run a rather small and basic, but functional, web site for me and some friends on Rails. The site has been running on Rails 2.3.5 for a rather lengthy period, but a couple of weeks ago I decided to enter the new era of Rails 3. This is what I had to do in order to get things working.

While still remaining on Rails 2.3.5, I changed the project to use Bundler and made sure all of my tests ran well, and added a few extra ones.

I then upgraded to Rails 2.3.8. The upgrade was rather smooth, I didn't get any incompatibilities there, so I made sure everything worked, and then jumped on to the real upgrade, to Rails 3.

In Rails 3, I had trouble with the will_paginate gem (solved by upgrading the gem to version 3.0.pre2). I also had problems with Authlogic saying: "undefined method `to_key' for #". I solved this by using the form_for helper change mentioned here.

Since there are quite a few changes between Rails 2.3 and Rails 3, e.g. the new application.rb, I got help from the plugin rails-upgrade (instructions).

In controllers, old root redirects didn't work, i.e.

redirect_to root_url

To solve this, I had to define a named route in routes.rb like so:

match '/' => 'posts#index', :as => :root

Then I can use redirect_to like so:

redirect_to :root

Rails 3 has removed the markdown view helper method, so I had to use the formatize gem to get this working.

From Rails 3 onwards, all of the stuff output in the views are html escaped. Make sure that you stop escaping the user-generated things, and, more importantly, un-escaping the outputs in the views that should contain regular HTML.

Happy upgrade!

On my presentation for TelecomCity DevCon

2010-09-22T14:41:00.003+02:00

This is (a preliminary) version of the presentation on September 23, 2010 at the TelecomCity DevCon 2010 in Karlskrona.

Bdd for Web Applications at TelecomCity DevCon 2010

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On DevCon10

2010-08-13T11:25:00.005+02:00

In September, I'll speak at TelecomCity DevCon 2010 in Karlskrona, Sweden. My topic is near and dear to me, BDD for Web Applications. I'll show how you'd go about to build a Java web app with the support from BDD, more specifically Cucumber with Java steps. For more information, go here and scroll down to my presentation.

I hope I'll see you there!

On Opening Applications from the Terminal in OS X

2010-04-27T19:56:00.003+02:00

Let's say you have used the Terminal in OS X to navigate to the directory containing a file you want to open with the default program, e.g. the .xcodeproj bundle. How do you open that file?

It's as simple as 'Open MyApp.xcodeproj'.

The same goes for when you want to open an app. 'Open MyApp.app'.

On RVM

2010-04-18T15:03:00.005+02:00

Do you happen to run Ruby on your Mac? If so, take 5 minutes and set up RVM, the super simple Ruby Version Manager.

By using RVM, you can install different rubies by using 'rvm install jruby-1.4.0' and switch between them by using 'rvm use jruby-1.4.0'.

Info on how to install here.

On Process Workarounds

2010-03-27T13:48:00.001+01:00

In product development in fairly large organizations, there are often rather strict development processes, which sometimes have to be worked around. All such Process Workarounds are evidence of a process that doesn’t fit the organization.

Let me give an example. How many times have you heard this conversation?

Project manager
- May 5th is our feature complete deadline, after that we won't change or create any new features.

Developers
- All right, then we'll do nothing than fixing bugs prep the release after that

Project manager
- Oh, but we still have a couple of changes to the functionality after that

Developers
- But didn't you just say we mustn't develop on features?

Project manager
- Oh yeah, let's file that as a bug!

Developers
- ...

The reason for the feature complete deadline is a common one in waterfall organizations; there is a lot of fear in the organization about (the previously promised) deadlines and thus the project manager has to promise to his/her steering committee that there won't be any changes to the current feature set. This self-imposed limit to the feature set is then worked around by filing changes as bugs.

In this situation I can fully understand the need to have deadlines; it’s very demanding to come to the lean development process where there is flow between the producer and the consumer of a module. However, it’s the workaround that bothers me. Either the change is performed, or it isn’t.

To the developers in this situation, my only advice is to learn to say No. When a process workaround is performed, it’s done by people, and people are the ones who can stop it.

To any project manager in this situation, my advice is to reflect on the why's of filing this as a bug, and the consequences. If you really need the changed feature, you definitely need to be able to sell the change to the steering committee. If you can't do this, the feature should probably not be implemented. Additionally, by filing the feature as a bug, you poison the defect rate measurements.

Technorati Tags: Thomas Lundström,Agile,Project management,Requirements

On BDD for web applications at ScanDevConf 2010

2010-03-27T13:25:00.001+01:00

The second of two posts on my Scandinavian Developer Conference presentations. (See the first here.)

Like the first one, this too is designed to be viewed together with some live demonstrations (in this case, cucumber + webrat executing the requirements against a Wicket Java web app).

Bdd For Web Applications from Scandinavian Developer Conference 2010

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Technorati Tags: Thomas Lundström,BDD,Conference,Requirements,ScanDevConf 2010,Cucumber

On Ruby for C#-ers at ScanDevConf 2010

2010-03-27T12:53:00.001+01:00

As I’ve said on Twitter, I’ve done two presentations on the Scandinavian Developer Conference in Gothenburg. As promised (although a tad bit late), this is the first of the presentations; my presentation on Ruby for C#-ers.

The presentation is designed to view together with some demos; those aren’t posted here.

Ruby for C#-ers (ScanDevConf 2010)

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Technorati Tags: Thomas Lundström,ScanDevConf 2010,sdc2010,IronRuby,Ruby,.NET,ALT.NET,Conference,DSL

On Operational Excellence

2010-02-14T20:25:00.001+01:00

A quote from The Toyota Way - Using Operational Excellence as a Strategic Weapon:

We place the highest value on actual implementation and taking action. There are many things one doesn’t understand and therefore, we ask them why don’t you just go ahead and take action; try to do something? You realize how little you know and you face your own failures and you simply can correct those failures and redo it again and at the second trial you realize another mistake or another thing you didn’t like so you can redo it once again. So by constant improvement, or, should I say, the improvement based upon action, one can rise to the higher level of practice and knowledge.

—Fujio Cho, President, Toyota Motor Corporation, 2002

If we compare this to the XP/Agile way of building software, this is more or less the same. Instead of doing BDUF, we develop a small slice through the system (Alastair Cockburn calls this pattern “Walking Skeleton”; the Pragmatic Programmers call it “Tracer Bullets”). Then we inspect the way the current implementation works, learn and adapt.

Technorati Tags: Thomas Lundström,Toyota,TPS,XP,Agile,BDUF

On opening up data

2009-12-16T18:30:00.001+01:00

This (in Norwegian) is a very intriguing article about Avinor, the company that owns and runs Norway’s 46 public airports, and their releasing of flight data to third parties. The data is openly exposed in xml format for anyone to use.

The article describes three implications of opening the data:

Better data quality through the eyes of many reviewers (i.e. the public)
Collective innovation - services are created using the public data
The opinion of Avinor in the public eye is increased

I like this process a lot. The more public data, the more innovation and services for us in the public.

Has Luftfartsverket (the Swedish equivalent) released their flight data? If not, go ahead and take the plunge!

Technorati Tags: Thomas Lundström,Biz,Community

On the Twitter retweet feature

2009-11-18T18:21:00.001+01:00

So you might have heard about Twitter implementing a retweet feature in its API. The reason is that today there are a number of different ways to retweet, and Twitter wants to clean up the UI and usage. I think it's a bad decision. Twitter is changing the structure of its entities in order to support the new feature.

In my mind, the thing that makes a Unix system work so well for the power user is that there are a large amount of different programs that can be combined using only a standard text format between each other. I'd like Twitter to work the same. If everyone agreed upon how a retweet would look, then the different clients could collapse the UI so that no one got a Retweet-storm, wherein one tweet is retweeted by twenty of your friends. That's the Unix way to solving the problem.

(Image credits)

Technorati Tags: Twitter,Thomas Lundström

On migrations

2009-11-14T11:08:00.001+01:00

Aaron Jensen recently asked what migrations tools people use for .NET development. In my current project, I use MigratorDotNet, which works quite well for us. The standard types of migrations, like add table, add column, add fk, are there, but if you need to do something more advanced, there's always a possibility to execute the SQL raw against the database.

What tool do you use to handle the database during development?

Technorati Tags: Thomas Lundström,ALT.NET,Migrations,MigratorDotNet,.NET

On Visual Studio 2010

2009-10-25T20:29:00.001+01:00

It seems as if the next version of VS will include more of the refactoring and navigation support that I find so useful about the Eclipse environment. I only hope that there'll be a working compile-as-you-code feature like Eclipse has, instead of the red squiggly one in VS 2008 that doesn't do a real compile.

Technorati Tags: Thomas Lundström,Visual Studio,.NET

On anchoring

2009-10-25T19:58:00.001+01:00

This article describes the decision pattern of anchoring, where your decision is made by taking into account previous decisions. One example of this in our software development domain is if someone has made an estimation, subsequent estimations will be made with the first estimation as an anchor. Highly readable!

When we know of this pattern, how do we do to minimize the effect of this? One example is point estimations and velocity calculations used in the agile community. Since we don't speak of real hours this is a tool to make sure that no-one anchors an estimation in real hours, which will ripple through in all re-estimations of the story in question.

Technorati Tags: Agile,Project management,Anchoring,Thomas Lundström

On my thoughts after the Agile Testing Days conference

2009-10-14T21:49:00.001+02:00

I'm just home from the Agile Testing Days conference. My general feeling of the conference is that I spent 3 days of constant learning, time well spent.

Of the sessions I attended, the keynote from Elizabeth Hendrickson was the number one. She managed to squeeze in a lot of good content in her talk as well as lots of laughs. I totally agree with her thoughts of the seven key principles in agile testing, but I think that the principles actually are wider than that.

A good quote that Elizabeth used in the talk:

If you want to move fast, you have to be very disciplined.

- Mary Poppendieck

The tutorial by Mary Poppendieck about lean software was also very good. I've come across most the things she talks about, but the tutorial is a good summary of the lean software topic. If you have a chance of attending this tutorial, go.

The value stream mapping excercise was great. This should be done on everything you do, not only the software project you work on.

I can also note that my BDD topic can't be that wrong. At least the Elizabeth Hendrickson and Gojko Adzic talks talked about the team sitting together and defining your requirements, which is one of the points I have in my talk. Another point I always nag about is the fact that you can't run an iterative process without using good engineering practices, e.g. ATDD/BDD, TDD and CI, or you'll end up with unmaintanable code in the end.

Technorati Tags: Thomas Lundström,Agile Testing Days,Conference

Presentation at Agile Testing Days

2009-10-13T16:30:00.001+02:00

This is the presentation that I did at the Agile Testing Days conference a couple of hours ago.

BDD approaches for web development at Agile Testing Days 2009

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Technorati Tags: Thomas Lundström,BDD,TDD,Cucumber,Agile Testing Days

On running Cucumber under IronRuby 0.9

2009-08-09T14:03:00.001+02:00

Updated: changed the path to include IronRuby-0.9.0\bin, removed the need to create our own icucumber.bat script

Previously, I've made some trial shots of running Cucumber under IronRuby to interact with .NET applications, and made a session in an Oresund ALT.NET Open Space around it. The feeling at that time was that IronRuby unfortunately was way too immature to be used effectively in a production environment. During the spring and summer, however, it seems as if the IronRuby team has been working hard on both performance and functionality, giving us a 0.9 release a week ago.

The previous post on IronRuby + Cucumber included some steps of hackish nature, so I thought I should do a new write-up. Follow the steps below, and I hope you'll get everything working as it should.

Installing IronRuby

Download the IronRuby zip file.
Unpack in c:\ironruby-0.9.0
Make sure that c:\ironruby-0.9.0\bin is in the path
Test the path by starting a cmd prompt and run 'ir'. The output should say "IronRuby 0.9.0.0 ...". Exit by the command 'exit'.

Installing Cucumber

Install required gems: 'igem install --bindir c:\ironruby-0.9.0\bin cucumber rspec'.
The --bindir argument tells igem to place a cucumber.bat script in the specified folder, so we don't need to create our own batch script
Test if cucumber.bat runs as it should by running 'cucumber'. If everything works, you'll get an output saying, "0 scenarios", which means that cucumber can't find any feature to run.

Run Cucumber under IronRuby

cd to the cucumber examples directory (for me in my cucumber version, it's C:\ironruby-0.9.0\lib\IronRuby\gems\1.8\gems\cucumber-0.3.94\examples\i18n\en)
run 'cucumber features --no-color'.
If you get output saying something like "4 scenarios (4 passed)", you are on your way!.
The --no-color switch is to suppress coloring in the output. Apparently, IronRuby + cucumber + the console don't play well with each other, and you'll get garbled output, like e.g. "4 scenarios (←[32m4 passed←[0m)".

Test Cucumber against C# code

cd to the C# example directory (..\..\cs if you previously resided in the i18n\en directory).
Run compile.bat (if you get complaints on "'csc' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.", start the visual studio command prompt)
run 'icucumber features --no-color'. The output should say "3 scenarios (3 passed)"

Summing up

From here on, it's a bit of work to get Cucumber integrated in your CI build and get everything else working, but this is the first small steps to actually get a working integration between cucumber and .NET code. Previously, the IronRuby process was waaaay to slow to be usable, but now the startup time actually isn't that bad.

Technorati Tags: Thomas Lundström,.NET,ALT.NET,BDD,Cucumber,IronRuby,Ruby,Test

On syntactic sugar

2009-07-17T15:28:00.001+02:00

Previously, I've complained on the rocket operator in C# and the way it makes it hard for us to create nice, readable anonymous methods when doing the DSL dance in .NET/C#. Scala has about the same syntax, see this link. However, there seems to be a shorthand to declaring anonymous functions:

For those new to Scala, the expressions in parentheses are anonymous functions because they use "_" as identifiers. (_.bud) expands to (x => x.bud), where Scala chooses an x that is unique in the scope of the expression.

The same type of syntax could be allowed in C#; (x => x.IsValid) could be shortened to (_.IsValid). Unfortunately, I haven't heard that anything like this is in the pipe for C# 4.0.

Technorati Tags: Thomas Lundström,DSL,.NET,Scala,C#

On a new domain

2009-07-01T21:57:00.001+02:00

I finally got off my ass and registered my own domain. So update your bookmarks to http://blog.thomaslundstrom.com. The feeds are still at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thomaslundstrom.