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If you are a software engineer, you may move from project to project over the time. How to quickly ramp up with a new project is always a challenge. The term “new” I use here does not mean that the project is new and you need to start from scratch, but that the project is new to you.

Although we all like to start from scratch, the reality is that 80% of engineers are actually doing maintenance works on existing projects: fixing bugs, adding new features, etc.

When you move to a new project, you have to  Read more... (603 words, estimated 2:25 mins reading time)

Today I read a commentary of latest MSDN magazine by David Platt who is famous for his book why software sucks. In his commentary titled Never, Never Land, he compared our software development to the medical industry on malpractices, and drew the following conclusion:

Certain occurrences are never, never, acceptable. We need to define these events, publicize them and educate developers about what they are and how to avoid them.

In IT world, we’ve heard many best practices. I have personally contributed many of them in using VMware vSphere APIs, cloud application development, and writing sample code. For consistency with best practices, I call these never land “never practices.” If you search the Internet with “never practice” today, you won’t get any but this post at the top. But we do need more never practices. In the article, David offered one general never: never lose users’ data, and he asked readers to share more.  Read more... (430 words, estimated 1:43 mins reading time)

This is yet another post based on my notes taken at LISA 2010 conference. The talk is The 10 commandments in release engineering by Dinah McNutt from Google. Dinah did a great job in summarizing the basics of release engineering therefore it’s worthwhile to compile my note and share it here.

Note that although typical release engineering does not produce virtual appliances, the basic principles are the same. You will find these basics helpful as well.

Release engineering is a critical part of software engineering and should be treated as products in their own rights. But often there is disconnect between development writing the code and the system administrator who installs it. Release process is usually an afterthought.

Typical Release Process

The following steps are executed during a release run:  Read more... (417 words, estimated 1:40 mins reading time)

When a developer learns a new programming language or API, the first thing is probably to try out a HelloWorld sample. As said, real programmers don’t read documents. Although I don’t fully agree on that, it has some truth in it.

In my own experiences, I normally continue with other samples after HelloWorld one. When something is not quite clear, I check out the API reference or read some tutorials. Anyway, I am not telling you how to learn a new language or API, but trying to make a point here on the importance of code samples for the developers. In my opinion, samples are the most effective way to empower your users.

I think you would agree with me, there are too many bad samples. Here are some typical symptoms:

1. Too much boilerplate code to a point that the code illustrating the API usage got buried. Typical boilerplate code includes extensive exception handling, GUI, logging, etc. Some samples even have a common library that could confuse your users totally.
2. Too many API calls in one sample. You may need several APIs for a use case, but don’t aim one sample for multiple use cases.
3. Too much object oriented. Object oriented programming is a best practice for application development. But it could confuse your developers sometimes.
4. Dependencies on other APIs. To run the sample, your users need to install other libraries which may or may not need extra configuration or tuning. To understand the sample, users need to understand additional APIs. Extra burden, really!
5. Of course, typical bad smells of programming which are not unique for samples. For example, bad naming, unnecessary global variables, using object attributes for passing values between methods, etc.

Now, how you can develop great samples? Besides the best practices writing great applications, you want to follow the following guidelines:  Read more... (589 words, estimated 2:21 mins reading time)

IBM DeveloperWorks recently published the result of a survey of 2000 IT professionals excluding IBM employees. The key findings are:

1. Cloud Computing to overtake on-premise computing. For the question, “how do you rate the potential for cloud computing to overtake on-premise computing as the primary way organizations acquire IT by 2015?” 30.4% said likely, 21.6% most likely, and 13.6% definitely.
2. Mobile application development to dominate. 55% of respondents see app development on mobile grows than other platforms in 5 years.
3. IT professionals need, but often lack, industry-specific knowledge. 28.3% thought moderately important, 45.6% very important, and 15.9% extremely important. This is not an IT trend per se, but represents the demands for IT professionals.

The first two findings are mentioned and somewhat confirmed by another survey by Forrest and Dr. Dobbs, which is more developer oriented:  Read more... (445 words, estimated 1:47 mins reading time)

If you attended last year’s VMworld keynote by Steve Herrod or watched the online broadcasting, you may still recall the code2cloud.com website (see the top banner here). That was a very simple Web application meant for the keynote attendees to submit names and email addresses to win a chance to go to the backstage with the Foreigner band. The website was hosted at Terramark vCloud and continued to run for about one month afterward.  Read more... (189 words, estimated 45 secs reading time)

Following my prediction in a previous blog, Google just made the tools from its recently acquired Instantiations free to all developers/testers. Besides goodwills to the developer community, this move makes GWT a serious competitor to Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight for Rich Internet Applications.

You can give these tools a try while developing and testing Web applications, or Java GUI applications:  Read more... (198 words, estimated 48 secs reading time)

• GWT Designer
  “a powerful set of Eclipse-based development tools that enables Java developers to quickly create Ajax web applications using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).”

I attended Eclipse Day at Google headquarter today. It’s a great event packed with several great talks.

Mobile application is for sure a hot topic these days. There were several talks on mobile application development like Android Tools for Eclipse by Xavier Ducrohet from Google, Eclipse Sequoyah for Android App Developers by Eric Cloninger from Motorola, Tools for Mobile Web by Paul Beusterien from Symbian Foundation, and EMF for GWT by Ed Merks from Cloudsmith.

While sitting in the talk on Instantiations Eclipse Tools, I learned that Google bought the company 3 weeks ago. I expect Google will soon make WindowsBuilder, a famous WYSIWYG GUI authoring tool, free for GWT users, therefore further drive the adoption of GWT in competition with Flex, SilverLight.  Read more... (268 words, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)