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They Don't Write 'em Like That Anymore

Posted by editor on March 2, 2006 at 10:30 AM EST

Of old data and new apps

Being able to work on new stuff is a surprisingly rare privilege. More often than is generally understood, you're either enhancing or replacing already-extant systems. And, as they've been deployed and are in use, they probably have a whole bunch of data that needs to migrate to the new application.

If this task doesn't have "we'll get to that" written all over it, I don't know what does. It's an unglamorous task, one that doesn't excite most developers, who'd rather talk about new approaches, new frameworks, righting past wrongs, etc. Still, as John Ferguson Smart points out:

Indeed, importing legacy data is a crucial part of most software projects. It is also a task that rarely evokes a great deal of enthusiasm among developers. And yet it is of vital importance for the end user. These old databases often contain years of valuable business records that the user needs to access from the new application.

In our Feature Article, Agile Legacies: Using Iterative Methods to Import Legacy Data, John argues for an early, test-driven, iterative approach to importing the old data into the new application. Among many obvious benefits, such as a lack of surprises later in the process, he points out that this improves testability for developers and often reveals features and requirements that may not be specified by the customer but are implicit in the old data.

In Also in Java Today, developer Eric Bruno rounds up Mustang's key improvements for GUI developers in Java SE 6 First Impressions: A Desktop Winner. "The desktop improvements focus mainly on user interface (UI) performance and native OS desktop integration. The core improvements focus mainly on improving developer productivity and Java application management. Sun's Mustang team also put significant effort towards Web services support and security improvements. Overall, whether you're an application developer, a system administrator, a tool vendor, or a security expert, Java SE 6 has something for you. This article presents some of the interesting new features I used in some more detail."

"Speech synthesis, also known as text-to-speech (TTS) conversion, is the process of converting text into human recognizable speech based on language and other vocal requirements. Speech synthesis can be used to enhance the user experience in many situations but care must be taken to ensure the user is comfortable with its use." In Introduction to the Java Speech API, Nathan Tippy looks at the Java Speech API (JSAPI) and provides an extensive example of how it works.

Joshua Marinacci gives some Props to the Trig Teacher in today's Weblogs. Upon whipping out some paper and pencil and drawing the triangles I needed I realized had to remember which function to use. Is it Sine, Cosine, or Tangent? Hypotenuse over Adjacent? Adjacent over Opposite? All... blurring... together...

Did the recent java.net upgrade cause any problems for your project? In javanettasks 1.0.8 and maven-javanet-plugin 1.5, Kohsuke Kawaguchi works through his: "Java.net has upgraded its system and with that came a lot of changes to the web interface. So I updated javanettasks to 1.0.8 and maven-javanet-plugin to 1.5 to cope with these differences."

In "Getting to know GroupLayout, part 2, Tomas Pavek writes: The first part of this article provided the theory behind GroupLayout. Now it's time to try it on a real example."

In Projects and Communities, the latest issue of the JavaTools Community Newsletter features seven "do's and don't's" for open source project leaders, welcomes nine projects to the community, and congratulates five projects on their graduation from the tools community incubator.

The NetBeans Board Elections are underway. Anyone with a NetBeans.org login can vote for up to three of the nine candidates, all of whom have online profiles. Balloting continues through next Wednesday (March 8), with the new Governance Board announced the next day.

In today's Forums, mcacker is struggling with Debugging glassfish in eclipse "Hi, i am trying to get a dev environment set up using JAXWS-2.0 in Glassfish, and the provided eclipse ide plugin. i can get the server setup and a webservice deployed to it, but i cannot hit any breakpoints. does anyone have a configuration like this working, or can anyone suggest how to make it work?"

navinkjha has a problem with startup spash screen in mustang. Well, two actually. "I have splash screen in a jar file of an application. It has two problems: 1. If I invoke the application from command line then the splash screen shows up but does not go away once the login the dialog shows up. The splash screen goes away only after the JFrame shows up. The documentation on splash screen does say that the splash screen should go away after first window shows up but it can inconvinient as a lot of applications have a login Dialog. 2. It does not work with web start."

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Of old data and new apps
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