Netuality

As expected, more RCP-based commercial applications are seeing the light of day. XtremeJ has recently released (28th Sept) the XtremeJ Management Suite v3.0, a set of Java management tools for the developers and administrators to access, manage, and monitor the based services. This suite includes not one, but two Eclipse RCP-based tools, XtremeJ Operations Console and XtremeJ Java Management Tooling. Their site has a lot of eye-candy screenshots … go take a look.

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Well, this is the very condensed version of Martin Fowler's latest approach to requirement creep. His idea is : (1) 'start by charging the double thus allowing a comfortable buffer for the project' then (2) 'accept all new requirements without charge, in the limits of the buffer', (3) 'explain and agree with the customer that fixed scope approach was a mirage' and (4) live happily ever after.

At first, the approach seemed fine and I especially liked the 'risk mitigation', which is basically: if at step 3 you enter into a conflictual state with the customer and start rejecting/charging features, then at least you had peace of mind during step 2. Without this little stratagem, you'd be anyway into a conflictual state with the customer from the very beginning of the fixed-price project.

What I have some problem accepting is: point 1, charging the double of the usual rate. In his essay, Martin calmly explains since we have better and more productive people, we can actually do the job for less. So, in order to be able to apply this 'recipy', you have to be at least twice more productive than your competition. This basically places you in the upper region of the Gaussian bell, probably somewhere in the top 10% companies. Well, that's a nice audience ! It's always pleasant to know that you have 90% chances of not being able to apply this advice.

The 'double bill' strategy raises another interesting problem. How would you apply this when the customer is internal ? It is known that internal projects are plagued with massive feature creep (and this is probably one of the main reasons why these projects fail so often). By 'charging' your corporate sponsor (generally, upper management) you're either : asking to double the project length or doubling your team size. Both cases, you're in big trouble.

I guess I'll stick to the old way of doing things: providing good visibility on the project status, estimating each new feature request and letting the corporate pitbulls to do the negotiation dance. That is, until I reach that 10% Nirvana where we are allowed to charge the double.

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Nice excerpt from an Inc. article :

Future Beef's real albatross, says Darrell Wilkes, was an expensive computer system that ran enormously complex software from J.D. Edwards. “We were pouring all this data in, but we could never get the data out,” says Wilkes, whose job, as the company's cattle and supply expert, was to monitor the progress of about 300,000 head of cattle. And these weren't just any cattle. These were Future Beef cattle, raised by ranchers who met its standards for feeding and monitoring their herds. Wilkes had to keep track of which steers had been given certain region-specific mineral supplements, which had been fed their necessary doses of vitamin E, which had been measured for yields of particular tissues and fats, and what the optimum dates were for shipping each steer off to the slaughterhouse.

When Wilkes asked his staff for the numbers, they didn't have a clue. They had not been able to retrieve the data from the computer system.

“I swore a lot, and jumped up and down a lot, but it didn't do a lot of good,” he says. “We would have been better off going in there with a very simple system. At least the simple systems give you your damn yield report.”

Click here to read the whole article.

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If Trustudio Python plugin stops functioning after installing the shiny new Eclipse 3.0M3, try pydev instead. I've been using it for the last few hours - so far, so good. Well, you'll get nothing more than some syntax coloring, but that's the current level of all Python plugins for Eclipse for now.

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No, I am not a seasoned PHP programmer and I do not intend to become one. But we do live in a harsh economy where all IT projects are worth considering, thus my occasional incursions in the world of of PHP-driven websites.

I am not new to PHP either, but - coming from a Java world - immediately felt the need of a serious MVC framework.
Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel each time a new website is built. Just launch the obvious “PHP MVC framework” on Google and the results pages will be dominated by four open-source projects :

• PHPMVC is probably the oldest project and implements a model 2 front controller/li>
• Ambivalence declares itself as a simple port of
  Java Maverick project
• Eocene a “simple and easy to use OO web development framework for PHP and ASP.NET”,implementing MVC and front controller
• Phrame is a Texas Tech University project released as LGPL, heavily inspired by Struts.

The choice is not easy. There are no examples of industrial-quality sites built with either of these frameworks.
(some may say there are no examples of industrial quality sites built with PHP but let's ignore these nasty people for now).

There are no serious comparisons of the four frameworks, neither feature-wise nor performance-wise.
In the tradition of open-source projects, the documentation is rather scarce and examples are “helloworld”-isms.
Yes I am a bloody bastard for pointing out these aspects - since the authors are not paid to release these projects - and perhaps I could contribute myself with some documentation. However, when under an aggressive schedule I feel it's easier to write my own framework instead of understanding other people's code and document it thoroughly.
However, I have a nice hint for you. The first three frameworks are using XML files for controller initialization (call it “sitemap”, “descriptor” or otherwise; but it's just a plain dumb XML file). So you should safely ignore them in a production environment.

Because, the “controller” is nothing more than a glorified state machine. The succession of states and transitions (or “actions” or whatever) should be persisted somewhere. XML is probably a nice choice for Java frameworks, where the files are parsed and the application server keeps in memory a pool of controller objects.

But: PHP sessions are stateless. The only way of keeping state is via filesystem or database, usually based on an ad-hoc generated unique key, which is kept in the session cookie. More: PHP allows native serialization only for primitive variables; a complex object such as the controller can not be persisted easily, so it has to be retrieved from XML and fully rebuilt. Unlike in Java appservers, objects cannot be shared between multiple session, thus pooling is not an option. Thus, in PHP, the XML approach is highly un-recommended, since this means that the XML files are parsed for each page that is viewed on the site. Although PHP's parser is James Clarks's Expat, one of the fastest parsers right now (written in C), note that the DOM object must be browsed in order to create the controller object (which is becoming more and more complex as the site grows). This is called heavy overhead, no matter how you look at it.

There are a few reasons about why you need XML in a web framework, however this does NOT apply to PHP apps. Myth quicklist:

• it's “human-readable”. Come on, PHP is stored is ASCII readable files and even if you use Zend products to compile and encrypt your code, why on earth would you allow readability and modification of the controller state machine on the deployment site ?
• easier to modify than in code. This is probably true for Java and complex frameworks, but in PHP is significantly simpler than Java.
• automatically generated from code by tools such as Xdoclet or via an IDE. If you're writing it in Java, because PHP does not have such tools.

This means that the only serious candidate (between these considered here) for a PHP MVC framework is Phrame, which stores the sitemap as a multi-dimensional hashmap. Thus, you should either consider Phrame or (for small < 50 screens) sites you'll be better off writing your own mini-framework, with a state machine implemented as a hashed array of arrays and some session persistence in the database. I chose to serialize and persist an array containing primitive variables, using PHPSESSID as the primary key in order to retrieve and unserialize the array, all coupled with a simple "aging" mechanism for these users with the nasty habit of leaving the site without performing logout first.

Finally a last world of advice : use PEAR ! This often overlooked library of PHP classes includes a few man-years of quality work. You'll get a generic database connection layer (PEAR-DB) along with automatic generation of model classes mapped on the database schema (DB_DataObjects), a plethora of HTML tools (tables, forms, menus) and some templating systems to choose from. All in a nice easy to install and upgrade package.

Don't put a heavy burden on your upgrade cycle using heterogenous packages downloaded from different sites on the web, just use PEAR.

Or simply ignore the PHP offer and wait patiently for your next Java project. Vacations are almost over.

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