Software, Business, and Life
There are rumors around that it is impossible to use the JIRA API anonymously, even with an instance set up for public read access.
This is not true. I wrote a tiny example tiny project to demonstrate it by retrieving info from a public JIRA instance (the one for Hibernate).
The main source of this confusion: neither the official JIRA API Java client, nor the third-party (and easy to work with) rcarz client ships with anonymous access classes or examples.
Get the bits on Github.
Some years ago, the Java IDE marketplace looked quite different than it does today. VisualAge was very popular. Borland’s JBuilder was another top contender. Since then, many of the good ideas from VisualAge ended up in Eclipse, while the JBuilder of that era was replaced by a newer, Eclipse-based JBuilder. Not everything ended up on Eclipse, though: NetBeans matured to a slick IDE (with its own plugin ecosystem), as did IDEA.
But this post isn’t about today, it’s about a leftover bit of history. Back in that era, I had a section of this web site dedicated to the numerous JBuilder “Open Tools” (plugins) then available. That content is long obsolete and I removed it years ago. Remarkably, this site still gets hits every day from people (or perhaps bots) looking for it.
I agree strongly that Cool URIs don’t change, but that’s OK, because my old JBuilder Open Tools content just wasn’t very cool anyway.
On the off chance you landed on this page looking for it, here is a Google link for your convenience, or you can take a look at web.archive.org’s snapshot of my old list.
At Strange Loop 2010, Guy Steele gave a wide-ranging, excellent talk in which the key point was:
In essence, his notion is to use a divide-and-conquer approach, which he described as “map-reduce in the small” (or some similar phrase). This is analogous to techniques used to partition work in large distributed systems, but inside a single program.
I heartily agree with all of this. Massive multicore will be a dominant factor in software design in the coming decade. In 2010, most of us are happily waiting in a calm before a storm, because our multicore machines don’t have very many cores yet. For most applications, we get by with very coarse parallelism (such as one thread per concurrent user request being served, in an application server or web server). This won’t last – when cheap PCs have 50+ cores, most software will need to harness parallelism in a much more fine-grained way. Allocating only one core per concurrent operation will become ridiculous.
You can download Steele’s slides from the Strange Loop site, or watch this video of his previous talk at ICFP 2009 in which he covered some of the same material. At Strange Loop, Steele showed how to solve a particular problem (counting words in a string) in a manner amenable to parallel processing. His sample code was written in Fortress, a Sun-Oracle research language. Fortress didn’t bother me, but I heard some discussions about the language choice (and rapid presentation) as an obstacle to detailed understanding.
I propose to elaborate these ideas by walking through sample code, in a series of talks.
First, I will briefly summarize the need for fine-grained parallelism.
Then, I will present three code walkthrough examples in a widely used language.
This talk will use very few slides; instead it will be all about the code. Each example will show how (not just why) to parallelize algorithms.
This idea is worthy of deep understanding and practice, so I have in mind several talks, each using a different language, and with sufficient differences to be interesting even for someone who happens to be present for all of them:
Putting these together will take a while, so I have in mind spreading these over the next year or so. Of course, it is quite possible that only a subset of these groups/events, possibly an empty set, will accept this talk offer. In that case, I’ll take it as a sign that the St. Louis community already understands micro-parallelism in depth, and celebrate!
As these talks are scheduled, I will put the information here:
Emboldened a talk that Ryan Senior gave at the St. Louis Lambda Lounge (now available as a video), I grabbed the most popular two Emacs versions for Mac OSX:
and set up each on my Macbook Pro (10.6.2). For each Emacs, I also set up SLIME, Swank, and Clojure.
If that sounds like a bunch of garbled nonsense, don’t worry, it is simply a sign that you are a normal, well adjusted person, rather than a Lisp person.
It was a bit irritating to get these tools up and running the first time; there are countless web pages with the details (I won’t make that worse by adding my own here). The challenge is figuring out which instructions to follow, while ignoring the rest. The most tractable approach for me, for a quickly-installed, easily-updating, fewest-steps process, was to install the needed packages from ELPA, without any manual downloading/configuration of SLIME, Swank, etc. at all. I have no command line operations to share with you, because in the process I recommend, there aren’t any.
I used Emacs in school, but not at all in the last 10 years. Since then, my expectations for developer tools have grown – I think it is reasonable for a modern development environment to simultaneously:
My experience, coming in from that point of view, differs from what Ryan and a couple other people suggested: I suggest Aquamacs. It is much more of a good citizen on the Mac platform. Its menus are much more approachable. Printing works in a Mac way. You get tabs showing your buffers, by default. You get menu options to gather them up in to one window(frame) or split them apart, all by default.
It may indeed by worth switching to the non-Aqua version later, if/when you get so deeply in the toolset that the pure emacs experience is preferable… but I estimate you’d need to be pretty far down the path (much further than I).
Something I should try out eventually is the Emacs Starter Kit. Perhaps it would have given a sufficiently “saner set of defaults” to make the non-Aqua version a more reasonable choice. Emacs gurus seem to lean that direction, overall.
Here is the story of a substantial chunk of my professional life over the last five years. I didn’t tell this story in real time (for various good reasons), though I have mentioned bits of it in various talks.
In 2004, I co-founded a vertical market Software as a Service firm, Mobile Workforce Management (MWM). MWM serves the underground utility locating industry with a Software-as-a-Service offering, TicketRx. Most people interact with this industry only with an occasional “call before you dig”, and think of it as just a phone number. However, there is a lot more to that industry than a phone number; there are numerous companies involved, each interacting with the others to complete the work. It is a vertical market niche with specific software needs, which our product met.
I personally wrote and administrated the first version of the TicketRx software and the first few servers, and my cofounder personally performed analysis, support, documentation, operations, and mountains of other work. We then incrementally hired a team to expand our capacity (and make ourselves replaceable), building an organization to serve its customers. Our software startup became an operating business with a life of its own.
Fast forward… five years of incremental and accelerating growth…
In 2009, the opportunity presented itself to sell MWM, and we did so. MWM is still there, operating fine without me. The press release about the sale is online and is also reproduced below. It is amusing to see how PR-speak invaded, labeling TicketRx as “custom” even though its whole essence was to not be custom, but rather off-the-shelf and highly configurable. Perhaps it is custom in the very broad sense of being industry-specific.
As is common in deals like this, the “terms of the transactions were not disclosed”, along with many other interesting bits. Still, I have a great number of lessons-learned to share in future posts and talks; and as of early 2010, there is extensive information about the product itself on the company’s web site, http://mwmsolutions.com/
For some reason, the notion of having two companies then selling one, has been surprisingly hard to communicate. I still own Oasis Digital Solutions Inc., a consulting / custom software development firm, and work more intensely than ever with its customers and developers. Oasis Digital is growing up rapidly, with marketing efforts and ever-increasing process and organizational maturity.
Growing a product/SaaS business was a great experience, and one I hope to repeat. I’m actively on the lookout for another non-consulting software business to launch, when the time and opportunity are right.
St. Louis-based MWM sold to Consolidated Utility Services Inc.
Custom software product TicketRx, provides cost effective job tracking for utility locating company
Jan. 19, 2010: ST. LOUIS, Mo. – St. Louis-based Mobile Workforce Management has announced the successful sale of its company assets, including its commercial software as a service product, TicketRx, to Consolidated Utility Services Inc., an underground utilities locator company based in Omaha, Nebraska.
“With TicketRx, we created a customizable system to provide field service staff remote access and management tools for receiving, routing and tracking tickets and job assignments in real time,” said Kyle Cordes, a principal of Mobile Workforce Management (MWM) and owner of local consulting firm Oasis Digital. “We started TicketRx in 2004, and experienced great success with over 1,000 users and a growth rate of 25% per year.”
The sale of TicketRx to Consolidated will allow the company to integrate the system into their full spectrum of services that serve to protect utility companies’ underground infrastructure. In addition to ticket tracking, Consolidated offers clients systems for locating utilities, performing field audits and managing claims.
“Creating a comprehensive software solution such as TicketRx that fulfills a complex set of needs and watching it operate successfully is a very rewarding experience,” said Cordes. “I am confident the custom software solution we developed will make Consolidated’s business stronger.”
TicketRx processes one-call tickets from ‘call before you dig’ call centers or utility companies and then routes the work to the appropriate field worker. Technicians have immediate access to the information they need, which improves on-time performance. And managers have easy-to-use tools for scheduling, balancing work loads and providing emergency notifications. The system tracks all activity on the ticket, which can be used to create invoices and reports.
TicketRx is a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, a growing trend in which companies are adopting easy-to-use services that can be integrated efficiently, with minimal risk and at a cost advantage. With SaaS companies can have the service they need without the responsibility for their own internal servers, data centers or related IT staff, saving them time and money. According to industry analyst firm Gartner by 2010, 30 percent of all new software will be delivered as a service
Since the sale of MWM, Cordes will focus his energies on Oasis Digital. “The sale of MWM and TicketRx allows us to concentrate our efforts first on our consulting clients here in St. Louis and elsewhere, then later on our next SaaS opportunity,” Cordes said.
About Oasis Digital Solutions Inc.
St. Louis-based Oasis Digital develops custom software for workflow management, application integration, business process automation, and handheld devices for companies nationwide. Oasis Digital can produce a whole project or subsystem depending on the needs of the client, using a variety of computer languages and technologies. Fore more information, visit www.oasisdigital.com.
About TicketRx
TicketRx is a product of Mobile Workforce Management, LLC, and is a software-as-a-service program for the underground utility locating industry that can manage locating tickets from one-call centers or directly from the utility companies. TicketRx offers a unique combination of a broad feature set, fast setup and quick learning time. For more information, visit www.mwmsolutions.com/ticketrx.
A while back I was discussing the future of programming languages with a colleague, and we agreed that for all its foibles, JavaScript will continue to enjoy very wide and increasing use in the coming years. I wrote last year about Steve Yegge’s hints that JavaScript is the “next big languages”, see that post for the reasoning.
Based on all that, I set about writing a small test app to see what it’s like to program a Swing app with JS. After a day or so of work (spread over a few months), I offer my Rhino Swing Test App:
Run RSTA now via Java Web Start
Get the RSTA code (git, on GitHub)
It implements the same “flying boxes” animation demo that I presented a few years ago at the St. Louis JUG, but aside from a generic launcher class, the GUI is implemented entirely in JavaScript. To clarify, this is not web browser JavaScript; it is running in Rhino, in the JVM, using Swing classes.
The documentation for interaction between Java and JS is limited, but sufficient. For simplicity, I used Rhino as an interpreter, I did not compile to java bytecode. Nonetheless, the animation runs about as smoothly in JS as it does in Java, because the heavy lifting is done by the JDK classes.
I used Eclipse (with JavaScript support) to write this code, but of course JS makes much less code completion possible than Java, and I missed that. Typically I mildly prefer IDEs, but am also productive with a text editor. For working with a large API like Swing though, IDE support helps greatly.
Still, I recommend a look at this approach if you are fond of dynamic languages but need to build on the Java platform, and I intend to investigate server-side JS development also.