Lofi model @ work

My new story: 10 Best Java Frameworks to Use in 2021 A must read story for all Java developers!  Happy Easter and enjoy!

Someone asked me how to generate MagicDraw HTML report from a certain UML model automatically. This feature is actually quite practical since if you are working in a group of business analysts, architects, developers, quality assurance personnel and operators, you mostly don't want to tell them to use MagicDraw to open the MDZip file. In this case you have two choices available: Export the diagrams as pictures (JPG or PNG) and put them somewhere like in your company Wiki. This can be done easily but you lose the structure of your model and you need to copy the structure in your Wiki which kind of unpractical. Export the whole MDZip file as a HTML (dynamic) report, which can be browsed nicely afterwards. MagicDraw gives you an example how to do this from Maven, so you can generate the report automatically. So here are the steps: Create a Maven plugin project to run MagicDraw: You need to build a Maven Plugin project which should be used later in your main project. Copy the ex...

If you think that in year 2012 all companies which produce software and IT divisions in our world have already their optimized software development process, you are wrong. It seems that we - software architects, software developers or whatever your title is - still need to optimize the software development process in many software companies and IT divisions. So what do you do if you enter a software company or IT division and you see following things: 1. There is a perfect project management process to handle all those development of software but it is a pure project management without a context to software development. So basically you only take care of cost, time, budget and quality factors. In the software development you still use the old fashioned waterfall process. 2. From the tooling point of view: you have a project management planning and controlling tool but you are still in the beginning of Wiki (almost no collaboration tool) and you don't use issues tracking sy...

I would like to share my experience of moving from "our reinventing wheel" of Ant build scripts to Maven standard. I reworked some apps which have following characteristics: (1) Java Version: - The apps should be compiled with Java 6 version . (2) Basic technologies: - Some of the apps are using Model Driven Architecture/Model Driven Software Development things, it means we have some MDA/MDSD generators inside our Ant scripts, like AndroMDA or oAW . - Almost all the apps use Hibernate , so we need to generate the whole Database scheme to be able to create the whole database automatically. - Some of the apps use older version of ANTLR . So we have some of ANTLR source codes which have to be compiled. - Some of the apps use older version of Groovy . So we have some of Groovy source codes which have to be compiled. - A webapp uses GWT as presentation layer. (3) Packaging: - Some of the webapps have somekind of information about the version . For ...

Let's discuss advantages and disadvantages using Ant and/or Maven!

At the moment there is not enough information if you want to jump start with OEPE (and of course using FastSwap) and Maven2 (using M2Eclipse plugin). This HOW-TO shows you how to achieve this. You need to have Eclipse (3.4 or 3.5), WLS (10.3 or 11) OEPE, Maven2 and M2Eclipse installed correctly before you can follow the steps below: 1. Create a web application with the webapp wizard (dynamic web project). Choose a webapp based on WLS (10.3 in my case). Please change following settings afterwards to be Maven complianced: Source for web: src/main/webapp Source for Java: src/main/java 2. Turn on Maven project on the project above ("mavenized the project") with M2Eclipse. 3. After you mavenized the project you can delete the directory build/classes since Maven uses target/classes directory. Everything should be customized to Maven directory structure automatically. 4. You can add src/test/java - if you need it src/test/resources - and also src/main/resources ...

In my new project - as usual in a software project - we have a very tight schedule. Using our old JEE application architecture (Oracle 10g, EJB 2.x, JFormular, Ant with Maven2 dependencies, full deployment EAR, WAR and EJB JAR on Weblogic 10.3 with Java6) would mean that we will have a long turn-around time (code, compile, deploy and test) for our development. Our build process with Ant does not support "naked" deployment", so it takes ages before the artefacts are built, jarred and can be deployed in Weblogic. In case that you only change one small thing in your web layer (JSP file, Java class) you will need to go through all those build steps. In combination that at that time I had an old development hardware (3 years old) you can imagine how horrible the situation was... So I was searching for a better solution. We need a fast turn around time, especially in our web layer because I'm not an expert in JFormular and I definitely need to "try and error". ...