It's Thursday - what a day to visit jfoobar!

Ning Community for Joomla Developers - All Together, As a Whole

Written by Wilco Jansen Tuesday, 06 October 2009 13:57

Past week Amy Stephen opened a new social network where "those of us who develop using Joomla can come and share ideas, code snippets, ask questions, and collaborate on projects".

If you develop Joomla Extensions or Templates, or if you create innovative Joomla web sites, you are welcome and encouraged to participate. You can share your blog post, start or respond to a discussion or find people who are willing to collaborate on a new innovative idea.

You can join at joomladevelopers.ning.com. Feel free to invite others to join in.

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Continuous integation presentation

Written by Wilco Jansen Monday, 05 October 2009 13:48

Yesterday I have gave a presentation at the Dutch T-Dose event at the University of Applied Science in Eindhoven about continuous integration. I have uploaded my presentation to slideshare for those who are interested.

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Happy birthday JFoobar!

Written by Wilco Jansen Sunday, 04 October 2009 00:33

Exactly a year ago JFoobar was started, time to have a small party. What started as a birth day present from Arno, turned out to be a blogging initiative from a group of people. A total of 260 blogs have been produces past year, this is an average of 0.7 blog posts per day...not bad, since we tried to release quality blogs which I hope we succeeded with. The upcoming year it will be pretty challenging to reach the same level of blogging, if you want to share an article or join the blogging team, please leave a note.

In the mean while I want to thank the bloggers Amy, Andrew, Angie, Anthony, Arno, Ian, Robin, Tonie and Wolfgang for their time and effort to write those blogs for their work on the blogs!

Happy birthday!

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See you at the Wisconsin JUG!

Written by Wilco Jansen Saturday, 03 October 2009 15:00

Some time ago I have been invited to attend the Wisconsin User Group meeting. JUG's are the best example of local communities gathering together, and it is a real honor for me that I have been invited. I most likely will meet some old Joomla friend there, I won't travel alone since my buddy Michel van Agtmaal from Open Source Support Desk is joining me to visit the JUG to do a presentation on support for open source applications.

On the Friday we will visit the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point and do a session about open source and how students can get involved, looking forward to meet the students there.

Please check out the schedule at the Wisconsin Joomla User Group, hope to see you there!

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Continious integration; how it all fits together

Written by Wilco Jansen Friday, 02 October 2009 10:00

The term 'Continuous Integration' originated with the Extreme Programming development process, as one of its original twelve practices. When I started developing in open source we worked together with a group of open source (volunteer) developers, having some basic infrastructure like version control and coding guidelines in place. But every individual developer was responsible for the quality of the whole, resulting in various areas of the code-base to break after almost every commit. Within Joomla this problems still exists even with the Joomla Bug Squad acting as the main quality gate, but realize this is only for the current stable release and does not apply to the 1.6 code-base.

An important part of any software development process is getting reliable builds of the software. Despite it's importance, we are often surprised when this isn't done. Within the Joomla project the quality of the CMS is maintained manually by a group of people, and I found out that this is a very time consuming in an environment where a simple fix in the software can break a lot of other areas. The continuous build blogs have shown which (open source) tools are available to implement a continuous build environment. In this article I will explain how the various tools can be combined together to implement a continues integration process. It stresses a fully automated and reproducible build, including testing, code analyses, API documentation and (if needed) package generation process that runs after every commit. One of the hardest things to express about continuous integration is that makes a fundamental shift to the whole development pattern, one that isn't easy to see if you've never worked in an environment that practices it. In fact most people do see this atmosphere if they are working solo - because then they only integrate withthemselves. For many people team development just comes with certain problems that are part of the territory. Continuous integration reduces these problems, in exchange for a certain amount of discipline.

The fundamental benefit of continuous integration is that it removes sessions where people spend time hunting bugs where one person's work has stepped on someone else's work without either person realizing what happened. These bugs are hard to find because the problem isn't in one person's area, it is in the interaction between two pieces of work. This problem is exacerbated by time. Often integration bugs can be inserted weeks or months before they first manifest themselves. As a result they take a lot of finding.

Let us examine how the various tools can be put together.

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Usability, Scalability and Enterprise Search with eZ Publish 4.2

Written by Robin Muilwijk Thursday, 01 October 2009 18:45

Just 2 days ago eZ Systems released eZ Publish 4.2. As the title points out, this release focusses on Usability, Scalability and Enterprise Search. You can read the full community announcement here, and the developer announcement including full details on new features and fixes here.

I've already taken this new version for a spin on my localhost and I must say I'm impressed. Not only does the download page offer a wider range of packages, the installer now also supports installing a clean set-up or one with sample content.

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