Describing software architect job

I found a presentation about Software Architect Role.
In the whole (not always...) this presentation fit what I think about my job. Have a look if you have time.
Software (Solution) Architect role

free REST ebook

A few weeks ago i wrote many thing about REST and it's (miss)understanding.
As I navigate on software architecture I found an infoQ free book about REST. I didn't read all but what I red was enough interesting to write a small post about this.
this is the link REST emag, good reading !

light bug tracker

Few month ago we search a bug tracker for 10 to 15 user and internal use.
What we want :

• simple installation (no/embedded RDBMS, running on tomcat 6.0)
• simple tool (light to use and manage )
• management of many workflow with many different steps

We found JTrac. This tools reply to all our needs. All The functionalities are here.
Have o look.

Distributed Version Control System (DVCS)

I'm currently looking for a DVCS for a new project. I found three tools :

• mercurial
• git
• baazar

It's not easy to choose, and as usual I don't want to waste too much time in testing all three.

To go through the decision I found  many links :

DVCS explanations

http://weblog.masukomi.org/2008/06/27/why-you-should-use-a-distributed-version-control-system

http://www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2007/12/28/dvcs/

http://adam.shand.net/archives/2010/introduction_to_distributed_version_control_systems/

DVCS and eclipse

http://javaforge.com/project/HGE (hg est le symbole du mercure... d'ou le HGE avec E pour eclipse...)

http://www.vogella.de/articles/EGit/article.html#issues (git)

http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/BzrEclipse#Status (baazar)

And a comparison

http://www.warneronstine.com/2008/07/07/git-mercurial-or-bazaar/

at the end, I think, I will use mercurial and post if this tool does not fit. 

java encoding...

If you want to set java encoding to UTF-8 (or what ever you want...) you could use :

• JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS in you environment to set  file.encoding property with JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8  
• starting your vm with -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8  argument
• set the default encoding in your favorite IDE.

REST style

Last couple of days , I worked on a REST architecture. I never really worked on this architecture at the design level, I just applied some given rules during developments or maintenance. So I found this job very interesting.
My first surprise was to discover that a lot of people (including me) just take a  few REST characteristics  and claims to be "Restfull". In fact this is not a problem, but those people provide and promote something else that REST.
If you have time you could have a look at the Roy Thomas Fielding's phd thesis or you could have a look at the richardson maturity model. To be honest, the link that makes me realize what is really REST is this one : http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven.

The key points of REST :

• ressources
• hypermedia
• server statelessness

In this list it seems thats hypermedia driven application is not well considered (accepted?). 

What ever read the previous link if what is preceding seems not clear.

Enjoy! 

PDE and Maven 3

During my work we have to build project documentation (as usual...). On this subjet, I like maven site. Why ? because :

• Your documentation is at the nearest place from the source code
• You don't have to search in which document do this task
• you could easily put in SCM you documentation
• you could easily create a PDF

I start working with the first version of Maven and then I have to deal with maven 2 migration and subsequent repository modification, and so on. So, I don't want to go to maven 3. Til I read how maven's community do the job. They do a lot to insure compatibilty, and it's a really big work!

So I face an old problem : my documentation is for an Eclipse Plugin and with maven 2 it was very difficult to put the build lifecycle in maven.

But I discoverer tycho for M3 and I really appreciate it. With this plugin you don't have a huge effort to do the work... You just write a small pom with tycho's dependency and args and that's all, then tycho delegate the dependencies resolution...

This plugin is version 0.8 and looks like to do a lot of thing.

Now I'm relying on this plugin for the build, metric generation and site building.