Rocket Surgery

Ever since GotDotNet shut down, it’s become very difficult to find a copy of the .NET Web Service Studio 2.0.

So, as a public service, I am providing it for download free of charge here.

If you’re not familiar with it, here is a blurb from the readme and a screenshot:

.NET Webservice Studio is a tool to invoke webmethods interactively. The user can provide a WSDL endpoint. On clicking button Get the tool fetches the WSDL, generates .NET proxy from the WSDL and displays the list of methods available. The user can choose any method and provide the required input parameters. On clicking Invoke the SOAP request is sent to the server and the response is parsed to display the return value.

This tool is meant for webservice implementers to test their webservices without having to write the client code. This could also be used to access other webservices whose WSDL endpoint is known.

I recently set up StatSVN at my workplace. It’s a great tool for getting statistics from your Subversion repository - which in case you didn’t know, has a great deal of rich data regarding your team’s activity that can be extracted by analyzing source code activity. You can get very nice graphs of activity over time, check-in activity by author, churn (the amount of repeated check-in of the same files), proportion of adds versus updates, even things like which days of the week or hours of the day get the most repository activity.
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I was messing with the Google Web Toolkit yesterday. My friend Jeff is a big fan of it, and he is actually using it for a Navy system that I once worked on. He’s gotten a couple of his coworkers on the bandwagon, so I started messing with it.

If you don’t know, GWT is a tool for creating AJAX applications. You write code in Java, and the GWT compiler translates it into Javascript instead of byte code. Separating the client side from the server side is built in, and they have done things to simplify RPC calls back to the server from the client.

First thing I liked is that the installation is dead easy. Download a zip file, explode it somewhere, and to make things simple, add it to your execution path. There is nice eclipse integration too. Adding and removing widgets (UI elements) from the page was also dead easy, and hooking up listeners to react when things are messed with was a breeze.
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I have been playing with Google Analytics the past few days. It’s an extremely cool web monitoring system, with great graphs and such. Shame it’s so poorly documented and sometimes doesn’t work.

Installing GA is really simple - you sign up and get an account, which gives you a unique id number for the site(s) you want to monitor. You can have many ID’s per GA account. Once you have the id, you paste the supplied script into the bottom of each page you want to monitor. The script looks something like this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-#######-#"; // your site id goes here
urchinTracker();
</script>

All very well and good, except when I tried putting this piece of code into the footer of my Wordpress site, Google Analytics says it can’t find the code, when it’s definitely there when I do a view source on the page. Just to make sure it wasn’t some sort of Javascript thing, I even pulled up the page using Telnet, and I can see the script there. Can’t find any fixes for this on the web, either. Pity, too, because Google Analytics is something I’d really like to use.

Andy Glover is a generally nice guy, and he knows a thing or two about software quality. He came and spoke to us at the Southeast Virginia Java Users Group once, and I was very favorably impressed.

Anyway, Andy has written a new tutorial on using Hudson for continuous integration. I have used Hudson myself and it ROCKS. Amazingly simple to install (just download and deploy the war), full-featured, easy to use, and looks nice too.

I’ve started a new (mostly) greenfield project recently and after two years of having to code in an existing application with a restrictive framework, I was eager to stretch my legs a bit and break out some of the good ol’ tools that made me so productive in previous gigs - XDoclet being one of them.

For those who don’t know, XDoclet is an open-source tool that lets you put special tags in your javadoc, which XDoclet finds in a post- or pre-compile step, and uses to generate more code, or configuration files, or whatever else you want to generate. Most frequently, XDoclet is used to generate deployment descriptors and helper classes to go with the most important classes of a system. Hibernate promotes (or at least, promoted) XDoclet as part of its suite of tools for easing configuration. Almost any book on Hibernate includes at least one chapter on using XDoclet to build your Hibernate configurations.
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If you have ever needed to produce a diagram of shapes connected by lines — and what software developer hasn’t? — you’ve probably thought to yourself “there’s got to be a better way to do this” as you open up your graphics editor and start dragging around rectangles and lines.

One tool you owe it to yourself to learning about is Graphviz (www.graphviz.org). With this tool, you prepare an input text file listing the nodes, and the connections between them, and it produces diagrams for you.
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If you are using Ant, you owe it to yourself to check out Ant-contrib, a great collection of really useful tasks that make writing highly functional Ant scripts a snap.

For example, there’s a <if> task that lets you write in conditional logic, like this:

<if>
  <equals arg1="${target}" arg2="windows" />
  <then>
    <antcall target="build-windows"/>
  </then>
  <else>
    <antcall target="build-solaris"/>
  </else>
</if>

As you can see, the <if> task supports <else> conditions, and also supports <elseif>. It can test on any condition that Ant’s built-in <condition> task can, such as equality, the availability of a property, whether file(s) are up to date, even if a document is available via an http request.

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Sometimes you may find your team continually doing something that you wish they wouldn’t do. For example, you may find them continually hardcoding references to their c: drive in code, when the code eventually needs to run on a Linux box, but they never work on anything but Windows.

When cases like this arise, it’s almost obscenely easy to write a custom PMD rule to do code reviews for you to look for and flag these problems. PMD (pmd.sourceforge.net) is a tool for doing static code analysis and producing XML output files which can be transformed into useful outputs (such as HTML reports) for later perusal. Plug-ins for most major IDEs are also available.

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