Thinking Inside a Bigger Box

It’s been a year since my project replaced IBM WebSphere Application Server with a Java SE solution embedding Jetty. Looking back on the last year, I only have one regret: That it took us so long to make the switch. The difference takes a bit of perception: Our software no longer eats away our time, killing us with a thousand pinpricks.

But WebSphere is just the most blatant example of software that gives you nothing, gets in the way of a lean process stream, yet costs a lot of dough. I recently talked to a cousin who works in the oil industry. When we talked about our jobs, he expected me to be using lots of commercial parts, like other engineering disciplines do. The discussion got me to thinking: Why do I always end up regretting it when I use commercial enterprise software?

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If you though getting started with Rails seemed easy from my first post, you haven’t tried out Heroku yet. Heroku is a hosted solution for Rails that comes with a browser based IDE. There’s nothing to install. It is so easy that it’s almost ridiculous. To me, this is the future of application hosting.

One of the remarkable things about Rails is that it lets you get up and running very quickly. Here is what you need to do to get your first application up and running on Heroku.

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This is the fourth article in my introduction to Rails. In the previous articles, we created a web application that let us edit articles, added support for comments to our articles, and added some nice AJAX effects. But a real blog needs feeds, a decent front page and some article formatting. In this article we will add all these. The article contains no groundbreaking features, but mostly dots a few i’s and crosses a few t’s both when it comes to the blog we’re building, and details in Rails.

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Whenever I talk about Agile Software Development with people who have a strategic point of view, a very pertinent question always comes up: What about fixed price projects? Establishing an initial relationship with a customer about creating a product is often perceived as a weakness of Agile methods.

After being asked the question very many times, I’ve started giving a fairly standard response, which is basically the same as Tom Gilb gave me when I asked him: Make the bid together with the first iteration of finished software. Here is the project plan for iteration 0.

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In my previous articles, I showed you how to get started using Rails, and how to create model objects that are associated with each other. In this article, we will clean up the way that information is displayed and add support for dynamic HTML, or as the cool kids are calling it these days, AJAX.

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Mary Poppendieck has just published a presentation on Agile software development entering the mainstream (and how to fail with agile). The presentation contains a number of insightful key points, but one footnote struck a chord with me: According to Allen Ward’s “Lean Product and Process Development”, Handsoffs are the biggest waste of product development. This has long been a pet peeve of mine, and I want to examine why handoffs occur, why they are expensive and how to avoid them.

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