21-Oct-2005

(Via Juan Palacio in Navegapolis). José Papo in José Papo Weblog describes his open source development environment as:

- dotProject for the management of the projects.
- Eventum for management of issues and bugs.
- Subversion software configuration management.
- WebSVN to view the contents in Subversion over the web.
- TortoiseSVN to perform check-in and check-out from Subversion.
- Ant for automating builds.
- CruiseControl for continuous integration.

DENIM: give up using your pen

Ibon Urrutia in Linking Paths posts a link to DENIM, a system that allows you to draw a live representation of a system using a tablet PC or drawing tablet. This is very useful in the early stages of design when the ideas are in a constant state of flux.

The popularity of Java

Juanjo Navarro in más que código muses on the lack of popularity of Java. He thinks this may be due to two factors:

• Java must be installed on the machine, and no one like installing systems.

• Java was oversold at the start of its life, people became disillusioned, and now the effect of that first impression persists.

Java has a lot of good points; it is cross platform, has reasonably good performance and has very useful tools like Webstart. People should use the tool that is appropriate to their needs, and not worry about the platform on which it runs.

[In my case, I simply have not found a Java application that I want to use on a daily basis, and the few times I try a Java application it uses up my PC resources to such an extent that I have to reboot.]

Computing Curricula 2005

JorgeBec in Ingenieria de Software posts a link to the draft paper, Computing Curricula 2005 published by The Association for Computing (ACM), The Association for Information Systems (AIS) and The Computer Society (IEEE-CS). The report is primarily US centric, but summarizes the body of knowledge for undergraduate programs in each of the major computing disciplines, highlights their commonalities and differences, and describes the performance characteristics of graduates from each kind of undergraduate degree program.

Closed-door free software

José Luis Sánchez in avemundi posts a link to the article, About Closed-door Free/Libre/Open Source (FLOSS) Projects: Lessons from the Mozilla Firefox Developer Recruitment Approach by Sandeep Krishnamurthy published in Upgrade of June 2005. The article introduces the concept of a "closed-door open source project" and lists some of the benefits of this approach. The author presents five new arguments for why groups may wish to organize this way. The first argument is that developers simply do not have the disposable time to evaluate potential members. The next two arguments are based on self-selection- by setting tough entry requirements the project can ensure that it gets high quality and highly persistent programmers. The fourth argument is that expanding a group destroys the fun. The fifth argument is that projects requiring diverse inputs require a closed door approach.