Last wednesday, we held our Open Source Love Day for June 2010. This one was productive despite the heat that had us sweating the whole day long (as a sidenote: it got even warmer the days afterwards). Some features were finished and will help at least us in our projects. We still look forward for the right way to release them. Another release was even more problematic, you will read about it below.
The Open Source Love Day
We introduced a monthly Open Source Love Day (OSLD) to show our appreciation to the Open Source software ecosystem and to donate back. We heavily rely on Open Source software for our projects. We would be honored if you find our contributions useful. Check out our first OSLD blog posting for details on the event itself.
On this OSLD, we accomplished the following tasks:
- Launch4j is a java application launcher for Windows, handling all the stuff a startup script would do, too. At the last OSLD, we added the ability to restart the application in case of a crash or other unplanned exit. To utilize this feature for automatic update routines, we needed to add the additional feature of starting another command instead of the original one. If the program fills a special file with the command needed, Launch4j will execute it after the program’s exit. This patch builds onto the previous patch and we are still investigating how to publish this functionality without breaking backward compatibility. We are looking forward to release it on the next OSLD.
- We use RXTX to perform the serial (RS232) communication on all our java projects. We worked on an issue with serial converters over the course of several OSLDs now and released the patch to the issue tracker of RXTX after a longterm stability test. See the reworked patch for issue #144. There is another issue with the flush() method that seems to affect not only virtual RS232 ports that we currently investigate. But we aren’t yet able to come up with a complete issue description or a fix, so this will be suspended until the next OSLD.
- We have written the Campfire Hudson Plugin as part of previous OSLDs. When issues emerged, we got patches from the community here. Thank you guys! We included the changes to the code and prepared a new release, when maven failed. This is not an issue, except when it fails repeatedly and messes up the workspace and the repository. After a long time of helpless fiddling with the parameters, we decided to start over and increase the version number to 2.1 (instead of 1.2). All of a sudden, everything worked out fine. Maven is a mysterious beast.
- The initial work for a New Hudson Plugin was made. One tradition of the OSLD has always been to scratch our own itches. While there are many useful hudson plugins, we have the immediate need for another one that doesn’t exist yet. Without going into details here (we save this for the next OSLD), we produced a proof of concept and a first iteration of the code. Stay tuned for details on the next OSLD.
What were our lessons learnt today?
- If you don’t succeed with maven’s automatic processes, do not try to sort out things manually. You’ll just end up with a gigantic mess that won’t work either way. The best way to deal with maven failures is to revert everything and try again with different parameters.
- The best approach to develop hudson plugins is to adapt the old “monkey see, monkey do” process. There are so many plugins already, chances are good your immediate question was already answered somewhere. Just check the found solution for accidental complexity. Sometimes, the first solution isn’t the easiest.
- When dealing with the legacy Win32 API, combined knowledge scraping is king. We had discussions throughout the day that only consisted of little parts of recollections about knowledge that seemed long forgotten. But finally, we put the pieces together and solved the problem. It should be called teamthink, i guess.
Retrospective on the OSLD
The weather at this OSLD was way too hot to operate at normal speed. But we got some nice results and a cliffhanger for the next OSLD. We left soaked with sweat but happy that evening.
Schneide Blog 