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John Ferguson Smart
 
John is a freelance consultant specialising in Enterprise Java, Web Development, and Open Source technologies, currently based in Wellington, New Zealand. Well known in the Java community for his many published articles, John helps organisations to optimize their Java development processes and infrastructures and provides training and mentoring in open source technologies, SDLC tools, and agile development processes. John is principal consultant at Wakaleo Consulting, a company that provides consulting, training and mentoring services in Enterprise Java and Agile Development.
If you are a NetBeans user working with Maven, you're in luck with NetBeans 6.7.1! This latest release comes with a swathe of cool features to help you work with your Maven projects pretty much out-of-the-box.
Grails is an excellent, highly productive development framework that positively encourages good development and testing practices. This article shows how to set up a Continuous Integration build job to compile and test your Grails application in Hudson, for automated continuous integration.
Want to provide maps in your web application? The Google Maps API is straightforward to call from Java, and with an Ajax-ian approach, you can make it extra user-friendly. John Ferguson Smart shows you how to combine these approaches.
Jabber is a popular and widely supported XML-based API for exchanging instant messages. You could compose the messages by hand, but there's an alternative. John Ferguson Smart introduces the Smack API, which makes it easy to use Jabber services from Java.
Standards are so much easier to adhere to when your tools do it for you. Thanks to JAX-WS and its implementation in application servers like GlassFish, you can write web services as plain ol' Java objects, just by adding a few annotations. John Ferguson Smart shows how it's done.
The best way to integrate in a hurry is to have been doing it all along. This practice of continuous integration is greatly helped by automated tools to check out and build your team's code on a more or less constant basis. Apache Continuum offers a free and open source tool to do continuous...
Oftentimes, your new code replaces an older system whose data must be migrated to the new system. This isn't a process that gets a lot of thought, but John Ferguson Smart says it probably should. In this article, he shows how an iterative, test-driven approach can save you a lot of headaches...
So you've got hundreds of tests, but they take ages to run. You have a Continuous Integration server, but it takes an hour to tell anyone when there's a failure. What can you do?
For anyone who's interested, I'll be giving a session at CommunityOne in May entitled "Open source tools to optimize your development...
A little while back I had a ball of a time doing an interview with my good mate Andy Glover about the upcoming Java Power Tools book. It was a...
About a year ago, I launched a poll to learn what Continuous Integration servers people were using. The results were interesting...
The original CI tool (if you don't count...
The ultimate aim of writing software is to produce a product that satisfies the end user and the project sponsor (sometimes they are the same, sometimes they are different). How can we make sure...
It's been a while since I've given any updates on the status of the Java Power Tools book. So, here goes. The actual writing is done. Over...
Traditionally, in both CVS and Subversion, if you want to merge some changes from a branch back into the trunk, you need to specify the changes you want to apply. As in "I want to merge the...
Spring-MVC might use the old MVC model rather than the more recent component-based approachs. It doesn't come with lots of AJAX-based components. It doesn't come with its own arcane tag library...
The forthcoming version of Subversion (version 1.5) promises a few niceties, but the best of the lot will be the long-awaited merge tracking feature.
Last week, I did a presentation for the Java Users Group of Wellington, New Zealand. The meeting went well, with standing-room-only attendance - the Java developers of Wellington are a great bunch!
The Java Power Tools book is now nearing completion. It's currently being reviewed, and I have done some major reorganizing of the contents. All the important content is still there, and there is...
This entry is a short note on an issue I found when using Spring MVC, Tiles and Jetty together. I couldn't find any mention of it on Google, so maybe it only happens on my machine (yeah right...
There's still time to be part of Java Power Tools!
Some open source projects have excellent documentation (Spring and Hibernate come to mind...
Get up and running fast with JavaServer Faces fast
Testing tools are starting to take up a sizable chunk of the Java Power Tools book, which is probably logical, as proper and efficient testing should play...
NetBeans 5.5 now offers excellent Subversion support. The last time I looked at NetBeans (maybe 6 months ago), Subversion support was all but nonexistent. Now it is first class.
Code Armory is promising new web site founded by Surjendu Sekhar Kuila and Chirantan Chatterjee, which provides some useful tips on tricky real-world Java...
The IDE you use can arguably play an important role in your productivity as a developer. Does your IDE blend into the background and become a natural extension of your brain? Or do you struggle...
The Java Power Tools website includes, among other things, a new poll on Software Configuration Management (SCM) tools. I'm interested to see how Subversion...
The Java Power Tools website includes, among other things, a poll on Continuous Integration tools. Many people have already voted, and I have had a lot of...
I've been thinking about MDA tools of late. The Java Power Tools book way initially supposed to include a chapter on these tools, but I'm not sure how...
This weekend, I redesigned the "Java Power Tools" web site, and shipped the lot onto wikidot.com. The move was mainly motivated by a need to have more visibility on...
What Open Source issue management solutions do you use? What is your favorite?
For my part, I quite like Trac, which has excellent Subversion integration.
"Java Power Tools" is a new book that I'm currently working on for publication by O'Reilly. It is basically about software tools and techniques that can...
For anyone interested, I wrote a comparative review of four open source continuous integration tools here. I looked at...
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