Category: Development

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Development

Java migrations tools

Wow, it’s been a while. If you’re interested in good links follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/anderssv . I usually update there these days.

My talk on “Agile deployment” got accepted for JavaZone this year! I’m extremely happy, but a bit scared too. 🙂 I’ll be talking about rolling out changes in a controlled manner, and one of the things that are usually neglected in this scenario is the database side. I’ll cover stuff like packaging and deploy of the application too, but that’s probably the area where I know the least. The database side of things are really sort of my expertise.

I have written some blog posts on this already, and in relation to the talk and things at work I did a quick search for Java migration tools. DBDeploy I have used earlier, but there are now a couple of other contenders. Here’s my list so far of tools that work on sql deltas that can be checked into SCM:

  • DBDeploy – Tried, few features but works well. Ant based.
  • DbMaintain – Probably has the most features. Ant based.
  • c5-db-migration – Interesting alternative, similar to DBDeploy. Maven based.
  • scala-migrations – Based on the Ruby on Rails migrations. Interesting take.
  • migrate4j – Similar to Scala Migrations, but implemented in Java.
  • Bering – Similar to Scala Migrations, and looks a lot like Migrate4J

I’ll definitely be looking into DbMaintain and c5-db-migration soon. DbMaintain looks promising, or I migh just contribute to DBDeploy some features. I’ll let you know how it went. 🙂

(updated with scala-migrations, bering and migrate4j after first post)

Categories
Development

Disconnected architecture

I was reading an interview with Renzo Piano in this fridays issue of D2. He is one of the most revered architects of our time and is responsible for many great buildings, amongst them the Pompidou centre in Paris which was his first big break through. He is known for his innovative ideas, but also his very good technical and functional execution of the designs. He was interviewed in connection with the Tjuvholmen project in Oslo, and one of the quotes was just spot on (my translation):

My fundamental reason has it’s origins in my builder background. To me, architecture is a craft. You can’t separate the idea of a building from the execution of it, even though a lot of architects act like it. This has been catastrophic for architecture. – Renzo Piano

In the software world there seems to be a notion that you can draw the architecture, and then let someone else design the details. Because it is based on high level ideas and sometimes faulty assumptions it becomes a resistance for building a good solution, in stead of enabling a solid foundation. Stop separating the architecture from execution, and make sure it is something that is flexible and evolves as execution moves forward. In other words: Architects need to take part in the execution to see the constraints the architecture imposes, and see new opportunities for the architecture to evolve into.

I’m not going to go into that rant now, that’s content for another post, but that also means that the architecture must be evolvable. And less code is more flexible than a lot of code. Strangely enough most architectural constraints tend to lead to more code, not less. 🙂

Categories
Development

Agile deployment talk retro

On wednesday I did a talk at the Norwegian Java User Group about agile deployment. The slides (in norwegian) are available here as well as embedded on the bottom of this post.

From the comments and questions I got afterwards, I could see how I should have included more detail. That would have made it even more interesting for that kind of crowd. I probably also should have clearified that I had limited time to prepare and that this was just a slightly extended version of a lightning talk I held at XP Meetup last year. I hope to get the chance to correct this in a JavaZone talk with more details. If you did see the talk and have comments please do leave them at the bottom of the page. 🙂

Many of the questions I got revolved around the handling of the database, so I just thought I should give some pointers here to articles that better describes what I have been up to:

Check them out if you’re curious.

Smidig Utrulling

View more presentations from Anders Sveen.