So, this is not a timely post, but …
The first formal meeting of the Ruby India User Group at Bangalore was held a few days ago at our offices. We had around 30 people packed into a tiny meeting room, so “standing room only” was an understatement.
There were people with a range of Ruby experience; so in the first hour, Yogi talked on “doing things the Ruby way” — essentially an intro to the language by explicitly coding a small application, live. A very interactive way to explain the basics of Ruby.
In the second hour, we had Bret Pettichord demo Watir and Selenium . Watir seems really cool, (and I’ve already started using it on a couple of our apps) but it seems a shame that it only works on Windows. So a lot of the discussion centered around getting Watir and Selenium to work together.
All in all, a very intersting couple of hours. I can’t wait for the next meet, where we’ll probably talk about Rails.
The pretentiousness of the title is purely a reflection of a sleepless night, a day before go-live.
Whenever I have faced jar hell during java development, it’s always turned out to be due to Log4J; which is a shame, since log4j is, for good reason, the leader among Java logging tools. Having spent a few tense hours recently with this, I thought I should blog it for the benefit of other unwary souls out there!
So did you know that if you had multiple versions of log4j in you classpath, you are likely to get
java.lang.VerifyError: (class: org/apache/log4j/LogManager,
method: <clinit> signature: ()V) Incompatible argument to function
at org.apache.log4j.Logger.getLogger(Logger.java:94)
This seems to be a reasonably common occurance, but try telling that to the log4j developers.
And no, I havent found a solution, except forcibly remove the log4j dependency :(
So it seems Brian McCallister and Don Coleman have been awarded a Ruby Codefest Grant to create Ruby bindings for Lucene. Cool!
I’d started on the gcj/SWIG path with the idea of doing Lucene, but found I needed to tackle a simpler task first to get to grips with SWIG— hence POI4R. I hope I’ll have some time to contribute to the Lucene effort as well.
Another java application that I hope to see wrapped to ruby is FOP. This one should be simpler than Lucene.
Agile India 2005 this weekend was fun. My talk on DamageControl, I thought, went well — no crashes during the demo.
More interesting was the panel I moderated on Distributed Agile. The consensus seemed to be that distributed agile works better than distributed waterfall, but differences remained on the extent to which not having colocated teams depress efficiencies. In any event, there were many insights into creating higher performing teams, distributed or otherwise. The panelists included Fred George and Ravi Mohan .
The best part, of course, were the dozens of interesting people one met … one of the best conference I’ve been to on that score.