For the past few years of my career I worked mainly on designing and developing J2SE and J2EE enabled enterprise batch solutions and spent some time on database scripting and performance tuning. These years were spent on developing more enterprisy stuff.
The year 2009 was a year of whole and sole open source technologies. It was more about Web Technologies. I did some projects using Flex and Apache Wicket following Scrum methodology. I played around with open source CMS solutions like Magnolia and even Drupal (crazy it may sound but it works)!! As far as knowledge sharing is concerned, I did a tech talk on Esper – CEP Engine and imparted a training on Advanced RDBMS techniques. Also, I did some PoC’ on different libraries. Apart from this I got an opportunity to work with co-developers of Spring Framework and different open source projects at JTeam. All in all it was a good year of learning though not the best.
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In one of my projects I did some work on process improvements. The main target was to set up independent developer workstation. We stubbed out all the interfaces. Earlier we tried to share a development database in a group of 4-5 developers. But believe me, I’ve seen developers throwing coffee cups when someone touches their data. Imagine you spending couple of precious hours out of your day on analysing the data and then getting it in right state to run your test cases and the moment before you hit “Run”, someone drops in and mess up all your data. How insane!!
Well the answer is simple, give me my own database and save yourself from the typical excuses. I evaluated couple of open source databases like MySQL, Postgres, EnterpriseDB and finally settled on OracleXE. Well we use Oracle in production and hence its easy to setup development environment with OracleXE with almost no extra tweaks in the scripts. I used DBUnit for testing database modules. It works quite well, but I think my strategy to setup test data was not optimum. It takes bit longer to run the tests now. I used Dumbster as a fake SMTP server and XStream for creating enriched objects for my tests.
Also one useful tool I would like to share here is DBMonster. It really helped me for generating mass random test data. Now I don’t have to request the DBA’ to give me test data. Well its not that simple also, as you need to understand the states of the dataset to create the seed xml files. But I think its still better than having human dependencies.
Happy Development 
!!
I was really upset with the intermittent 500 Internal Server Error on Blogger. So finally decided to move to Wordpress. I liked the nice flexible themes offered by wordpress. Shaping up my blog in here!!!
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