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Works well with others

Posted by daniel on September 17, 2004 at 3:35 PM EDT

What's your Meyers-Briggs classification

In today's Weblogs, Craig Castelaz reports that "nearly every conversation I've ever had about extreme programming eventually works its way to pair programming, which pretty much kills the dialog part of the conversation." I think he's dead right about this. I've always argued that pair programming is orthogonal to the other XP practices. Although I understand the reasons the three Extremos give for pair programming, I don't want people who have fundamental deep down objections to pair programming to not do XP. In particular, I want programmers to adopt TDD and other useful practices without feeling that they can't unless they pair program.

Although the XP community may say to me, "but if you're not doing pair programming you're not doing XP", I'd like to look at it a bit differently. We all know single issue voters (although that issue varies for different people) who agree with most of what one candidate stands for but votes for the opposing candidate because of their stance on a single issue. I don't want pair programming to be that issue that causes teams to vote yes or no to adopt XP.

Craig's post looks at studies of whether or not pair programming leads to productivity gains. He writes that "the researchers report that low-concurrency pairs (those working most independently of one another) were four times more productive than the potentially more collaborative high-concurrency pairs. That is, the reexamination of the existing data does not substantiate the productivity claims of the other studies. The authors then go onto propose that the difference might lie with the pair programming protocol itself, i.e. the pilot/navigator roles, and the switching between them that occurs during the development session."

Cliff Schmidt talks about Apache Beehive, XMLBeans and Open Source Strategy He writes "These are just a few reasons that have nothing to do with marketing or tossing a dying product over the wall. Instead, these are objectives that a corporation might use to provide more value to its shareholders, while also serving as an incentive for the corporation to do everything it can to make the open source community as strong and diverse as possible. Aligning strategic business objectives with the interests of open source communities is essential for the success of any serious corporate involvement in open source."

In Also in Java Today , Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a well-liked communication tool, but it can be distracting to read each message and wait for the next to appear. One alternative that would be more convenient would be to just "listen" to the chat. In IRC Text to Speech with Java, Paul Mutton (author of "IRC Hacks") shows how to "create a multi-platform IRC bot (an automated client) that uses the FreeTTS Java speech synthesizer library to convert IRC messages into audible speech." His solution uses two open-source libraries and just a few lines of Java code to tie the two together.

There has been a rash of articles on customizing Swing components to meet the developer and end-user's needs. In this core Java Tech Tip John Zukowski explains Customizing the JColorChooser Component. He replaces the buttons at the bottom of the standard dialog box with a component containing text that reflects the color changes.

In Projects and Communities , James Todd blogs that JXTA 2.3.1 has been released. He also recommends the book "Mastering JXTA".

The Jini community's athena project beta 1.0. brings Jini's transactional integrity to data sources on a network.

A discussion of The Big Question returns in today's Forums with a look at forking. Cajo writes "Were the Java language to be made free, it would fork immediately [..] So is forking the language a bad thing? No! Here's why:The Java team has made their position on this perfectly clear already: they will not provide certain oft-requested features; under any circumstances. They are certain they know what's in our best interests. So for non-free Java, there are currently no options; other than to pick a different language. But some of us really think Java is the best language yet! So we're caught in a dilemma."

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