XML is not a Verb

My So Called Blogging Life

I don't know if these postings are timely enough but since I received absolutely no feedback on my last one, I imagine nobody was pounding the refresh button on their RSS client waiting for this one. Actually, how bad a blogger do you have to be when you don't even show up on Google's Blog search? A co-worker of mine started a blog close to the same time and Google happily indexed his pearls of wisdom but, for some mysterious reason, my blog was passed over. Eventually it did show up but I had more than few "Why me?" moments. I plan to take a critical look at my blogging "career" because of this. ;-)

If You Build It, It Will Hurt

On a more technical note, I've been wrestling with several portlet related issues with ICEfaces, particulary trying to get it to run on different portal platforms. For obvious business reasons we want our framework to run on as many platforms as possible. But the larger matrix makes for the typical software challenges in supporting so many different configurations (building, testing, etc.).

Let's start with the builds. Our product runs on a large number of app servers and portal containers. We're currently using Ant as our build tool and have discussed the value of Maven. I have a love/hate relationship with both these tools and I'd really like to have more of a "friends with benefits" relationship. For me I think it boils down to a distaste for programming in XML. I don't mind XML for structured data but with builds I want to be able to *do* something and utilize my koding skillz. I recently went to a Groovy on Grails presentation at my local Java user group meeting and noted that that Groovy guys have done some integration with Ant. Quoting from their site:

"If ever you've been working with a build.xml file or some Jelly script and found yourself a little restricted by all those pointy brackets, or found it a bit wierd using XML as a scripting language and wanted something a little cleaner and more straight forward, then maybe Ant scripting with Groovy might be what you're after."

At this point I'm standing up in my office yelling "That's me!". Now I admit I haven't even looked at how well this works but I think it has the potential to be what I want. Groovy is a real scripting language which allows me to code (with all the pros and cons of a dynamic language) what I want the build to do rather than describe in a tree/node structure what I hope it will do. It's well integrated with Java so I'll be utilizing my existing skills and I can use the full set of Java libraries. I'll be putting it on my "technologies to learn later" to do list. Along with Lego MindStorms.

Beyond the build pain, I've run into a few interesting technical problems with some of the portal platforms themselves but I'm going to save a little something for the next post.