I never really liked the standard version numbering theme “x.y.z-w”. The main reason I don’t like it is that you can not really distinguish the scenarios “working on version two” and “working on a patch for version one”. Both version numbers would start with “1.”. Some projects use the following version number scheme to distinguish these scenarios:

• 1.0.12 The 12th patch for version 1.0
• 1.99.12 The 12th development snapshot of version 2.0

During the last couple of days I have evaluated some tools for directory synchronization. My favorite was DirSync Pro, but I had one major problem with it: It does not delete files. The problem can be reproduced as:

• Synchronize 2 Directories (A and B, two way) - Now the contents of both directories are the same.
• Delete a file from A
• Synchronize again - The deleted file in A will be restored from B

I recently had a couple of problems with Internet Explorer 9. Some of them were caused by IE rendering the page in “Quirks Mode”. You can find out if IE renders your page in Quirks Mode in the developer tools (which can be opened by pressing F12). Adding a correct document type causes IE to render the content in standards mode. The correct document type for HTML5 is:

The German magazine “Java Aktuell” has published 3 of my articles (Ok, 2 and a half. One was written by Oliver Szymanski and me). One of the articles is about View Templates in JSXP. The other 2 articles are German translations of Generating Code and Direct Call Pattern.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has resigned from the Java Community Process (JCP). This is quite sad, but I totally understand their reasons.

Some people think that I am a big fan of code generators, because of my work on JSXP. There are others who think I am totally opposed to it, since I often complain about it. This article tries to clarify my view on code generators.

Everybody knows that the best way for objects to collaborate involves a lot of annotations (see for example Spring and EJB), some XML (Spring and EJB again), even more XML (Oracle ADF) and even some drag and drop in an obscure visual editor (ADF again). This is the industry standard, and it is pretty good, because consultants can make a lot of money, and consulting companies can bring in even more consultants into projects.

Today Oliver and I had a talk at the DOAG Conference 2010 about JSXP. It went pretty well, and I think the audience was genuinely interested in the technology. Also, the conference is really good, and I was impressed by the locaction (the Conference Center Nürnberg East). So, this was a really good experience, and I hope I can be here next year.

You can find the slides for my first talk at the Herbstcampus here: Acceptence-Test driven software development (ATDD.pdf)

The slides for the second talk can be downloaded here: Architecture and Design in agile projects (AgileArchitektur.pdf)

I will be at the following events in the near future:

• 2010-08-31 Source Talk Tage Göttingen: I will give a one day workshop about "Agile Methods" together with Oliver Szymanski
• 2010-09-13 - 2010-09-15 Herbstcampus Nürnberg: I will give 2 talks at the herbstcampus, one about "Architecture, analysis and design in agile projects" and one about "Acceptance-test driven development"
• 2010-11-16 - 2010-11-18 DOAG Nürnberg: Together with Oliver Szymanski I will give a talk about "JSXP" at the DOAG