Kevin P. Taylor

Summer is Back

It has been a cold and soggy Spring in Chicago. But, what a great feeling to have a beautiful 75° day and an empty lunchtime calendar. All over Chicago this scene is being played out today: office mates dining al fresco or lounging in a city park with a (programming) book or laptop with EVDO card.

Is the cold and soggy economy also ready to blossum going into Summer? Sure, there has been some relatively isolated pain caused by the foreclosure spike (still low in absolute numbers), but are companies actually pulling back on their technology spending? Even large retailers I speak to are not indicating a pull pack in IT initiatives--and they have certainly been feeling a slowdown in recent quarters.

EclipseCon 2008 Presentations

I'll soon be on my way to San Jose to present my experiences with Eclipse RCP development at EclipseCon 2008. The conference will be running from March 17th to March 20th.

In the 2-hour tutorial "Test-Driven Development (TDD) for Eclipse RCP" Nick Malnick, a fellow Obtivian, and I will be demonstrating practical techniques and tools for TDD'ing Eclipse RCP applications.

Yes, there are plenty of unit tests in the core Eclipse code-base. And, many teams developing applications on top of the Eclipse RCP platform are writing unit tests. But, very few true test-first development takes place in the Eclipse RCP community. People want to test-first—but the Eclipse code-base and architecture are simply not test-friendly.

Need an example? Try mocking out an SWT control using JMock or MockObjects. These are commonly used libraries in Java test-first development and totally unavailable to Eclipse RCP developers.

But, by putting the right tools in place, such as using the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern and PDEUnit, true test-first development is within reach and, yes, practical.

Red, Green, Refactor.

My long talk at EclipseCon 2008, "Creating Enterprise Business Applications Using Eclipse RCP", was originally presented with Scott Delap at EclipseCon 2007 as a tutorial. I'll be pairing down the material into a 1 hour format this time around, which should make it more focused.

"Creating Enterprise Business Applications Using Eclipse RCP" is a case study extracted from my experiences with a large (multi-million line, multi-year) enterprise Eclipse RCP project. The project goal was to build a CRM/Sales-Force Automation application that would eventually be deployed to as many as 40,000 users. The users had to have both connected and disconnected functionality, which required a local data store. When connected, the users needed the ability to sync up with the mother ship, or home office, of the client company. Finally, the business application was a shrink-wrapped flagship product for the client company and it needed to be branded, have a friendly installer, allow updating over the Net, and look good!

Fortunately, Eclipse RCP turned out to be a great platform for developing this rich client business application both because it allowed powerful UI paradigms but also because it was highly responsive when users engaged in extended periods of data entry. The downsides? Well, let's just say that there were some interesting ones. Come to the presentation in March to get all the details.

Destination: EclipseWorld 2007

Andy Maleh and I are on our way to present at EclipseWorld 2007 in Reston, VA. We arrived at Midway Airport in record time so we had about 1 1/2 hours to hang out at the food court. Andy had Chinese from King Wah and  I, unfortuately, had a Gyros sandwich.

From There to Here

This is the post where I attempt to convince you of the value of reading my blog. Well, that value should reveal itself in the content.

It may be of interest to know from what experiences my opinions and interests have grown. I have been programming computers since the age of 13. I purchased a TRS-80 Color Computer  after delivering flyers house to house over the summer. In hindsight, this summer experience was the genesis of two great passions in my life: the craft of software and the craft of commerce.

Since that first computer and part-time job, I have gone on to work as an oceanographic researcher, writer, futures/options trader,  programmer, consultant, and business owner.

I'm an advocate of agile practices, particularly both test-driven development and short, iterative feedback loops. I work as an agile coach, developer, trainer, and project manager and am currently the President of Obtiva Corporation and the Vice President of CJUG-West.

New Venue

From December 2004 till January 2007, I cut my teeth as a technology writer and pseudo-blogger at java.about.com. Thanks go to Avram Piltch, About.com editor-in-chief, for giving me the opportunity to write a lot of claptrap that occasionally revealed something insightful or useful. (The check every month didn't hurt.)

So why did I give up a paying gig editing a site with nearly 500K page views a month? About.com is stuck in the Web 1.0 world and there was no light at the end of the tunnel that I could see. With some 500 content sites and even more editors pushing out content, it is a publishing behemoth that doesn't alter course often.

So, I look forward to the freedom this venue will give me to publish my ideas, heterodoxy and all.