Scrum vs. Traditional Project Management

Recently I signed up for a SCRUM certification class and that got me thinking about my other effort which is to get PMP certified. PMP”ians” can boast that their certification is industry recognized and achieved only after giving a certification exam. SCRUM certified professionals are “certified” after they attend an approved certification class conducted by a Scrum certified trainer. No test required. Continue reading

Spring-WS

Took a look at Spring-WS and came up with a quick example service to describe its use. I decided to build the not-so-exciting but yet functional ‘echo’ service. Send in a text and it will echo that back with a date and time appended to the text. Continue reading

AJAX Roundup

Recently I have been playing with various AJAX frameworks, both open source and commercial. For simple ‘update a certain portion of the page only’ type of applications you can roll up your sleeve and deal with the XMLHttpRequest (XHR) directly or use open source API’s like Prototype/DOJO to simply make the call. Continue reading

Maven

Can build management be made easier? Chances are whatever approach you take will have its own pitfalls and challenges. Many of the Java projects nowadays use Ant as the defacto build scripting tool. Its not too hard really. Can take a couple of days for a the Ant build file to be created (based on project needs). And subsequently it has to managed like any other source code. This approach works well. Most folks now know Ant well enough to get most tasks completed. Why then would anyone want to move to Maven! Continue reading

JMX + Spring + Commons Attributes

In my previous log4j blog I had used JMX to expose management interfaces to change log4j levels dynamically. If you look at the JBoss JMX console in that blog you will see that the parameter names are named as p1 and p2. Not very helpful. By default Spring uses reflection to expose the public methods of the MBean. Parameter names get thrown away once classes are compiled to byte code. No use of it further. Therefore there is no metadata available to print friendlier names in the JMX console. Continue reading

Changing Log4j logging levels dynamically

Production issue comes screaming at you at 2am. Red-eyed you open your laptop and check the server logs. You see only minimal logging. After checking other areas such as database, network, machine health, etc., you wish you could turn on more debug logs. Turns out your development team did not provide you a feature to change log levels on the fly. Only way you can do that is to restart the application servers. Ok developers don’t let that happen to you or your ops team. Continue reading