Stu Stern is on the latest Speak Rich podcast on RIA Revolution discussing Flex Monkey. Thanks to Shashank Tiwari for interviewing Stu and covering Gorilla Logic’s favoriate testing tool.  RIA Revolution is a great resource for Flex developers.  If you haven’t already, check it out!

I read two good posts this evening with a similar theme, implementing a system is boring … at least when done well.  Stu Stern’s post discusses it from the standpoint of defining a clear architecture up front:

An architecture is sufficiently defined when we can turn a developer loose on developing some piece of functionality and he or she obeys all design constraints, there is a minimal possibility of creating software that produces any of the above problems. If you’re conceptually bothered by being constrained, preferring instead to program in wide open spaces with the wind blowing in your hair, perhaps you would prefer to think of architecture as providing the freedom from choice.

Alex Papadimoulis post, Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To, takes it more from the realities of building business systems on a day-to-day basis.  He basically concludes that developers get too enamored with all the noise in the software world and need to focus on building features for the business:

As frustrating as it can be to work with the uninspired, sloppy developer, the contrary – the inspired-yet-misguided one – is several magnitudes worse.

Alex offered a list on how to approach the profession:

1) Learn the Business.
2) Serve the Business.
3) Learn Off The Job.
4) Code mostly Business. (If the overwhelming majority of your hand-written code isn’t domain-specific and doesn’t relate to the application’s purpose, then you’re using the wrong tools.)
5) Tedium is Inescapable.
6) Find Satisfaction Elsewhere.
… and, if all else fails…
7) Get Another Job.

I do love Alex’s post and believe he basically hits the nail on the head about the attitude we need to take toward the profession. However, I believe Stu has better captured the reality of building software systems. Things do change and evolve in software in ways that are both beneficial to the developer and the business. Thus, defining an architecture up front on how the system is going to be built is an essential step to allowing developers to focus on building features that have value to the business.  If we succeed when it comes to architecture, then we can get on to the boring parts.

One could even say that if presidential elections are about the economy, then when it comes to software: It’s Architecture Stupid.

I spent most of the day working on setting up a new project with the latest Spring (3.0.0M1) and Hibernate (3.3.1.GA) releases.  I have more recent experience with Hibernate and was able to get everything working pretty quickly with Postgres on VMWare share.  It has been a few years since I last setup a Spring project and really got down in the guts with it.  I remember it being a mostly low cost framework that provided quite a bit of handy plumbing.  I have never been wowed by dependency injection for dependency injections sake, but I have always liked the things Spring pairs with their container (AOP, ORM support, etc).

Anyhow, as I dug in today I was pretty shocked to see how bloated Spring (and Hibernate) have become.  I have been guilty of throwing JAR after JAR at problems, but it was almost unbelievable to see how many dependencies each framework now has, which of course caused me significant versioning hell in attempting to get the right mix of JARs.  With each change, a tweak to libraries seems to come.

The other surprising part to me was the number of different options there are now for configuring Spring, and how difficult it is to find a clear path to follow.  I am huge fan of annotations, and I am glad that they added significant support in that area.  However, even though I now have a working setup, I have little confidence that I am completely inline with the best practices.

Our company’s founders, Stu and Ed, love to make the statement, “Freedom from choice.” It seems like a “lightweight container,” like Spring would follow this simple axiom.

Anyhow, I am posting my current project for feedback.  Let me know if you see any silliness or have feedback on how I can improve my setup.  It pretty basic so far … Hibernate with Annotations, Spring (Annotations, ORM support), and SpringSecurity.  Here is the project.

In our latest Drunk On Software video we talk with Alex Moffat, of Lombardi Software, about Google Web Toolkit (GWT).  The audio isn’t great, but there is still some good infomation for those looking for an introduction to GWT.

Last month, We posted a Drunk On Software video interview with Anvil project founder, Ryan Knight.  This month Ryan shared more about the project in an InfoQ.com email interview I just posted.  Check it out and let Ryan know what you would like to see in the next release of Anvil.

Late last year, James Ward and I started a videocast, Drunk On Software. I hate seeing myself on camera, but so far it has been a blast doing the videos. We absolutely found our own niche by adding the unrelated element of drinking to the mix. It has been fun to work on something with James again. He is someone that I have learned a lot from over the years, and has always pushed me to get better technically. I hope we are still doing our videos when we are old and gray. Hopefully by then we have figured out how to improve our sound quality (thanks for baring with us).

Anyhow, James and Bruce Eckel are hosting a Flex Jam at the end of the month. I am looking forward to attending and hope to see you there… Hopefully you will be willing to join us on camera.