I was pleased to find out that this was also available for linux. Great... Lets try it out.

First stumbling block is the requirement to register on the website before I can download a trial. I am a firm believer of try before you buy. I should be able to register but it should be entirely my choice.

I am more comfortable with registering before buying or for the use of a free piece of software. However, registering for a trial always irritates me. This was also the case when I wanted to trial InDesign / Illustrator the other day.

After registering, there was the irritating wait for the email to arrive. Now, this is irritating. When I want something, I want it NOW. I hate waiting. Adobe did not make me wait for the confirmation email of registration before downloading the trials. There are two good reasons as to why this irritates me.

1. Email, as reliable as it is generally, can take time. In theory, this can be anywhere from a few seconds to hours. How about if my mail server is currently down. Or even more importantly, what if I have shut down my mail client so that it does not keep distracting me from something that I am trying to do. Opening up my mail client, I now want to find out about the other emails that are in my inbox and whether any of them require an action...
2. I have reluctantly provided details about myself. Confirming my email address before I am allowed to download a trial suggests that Tasktop does not trust me enough to just let me download the trial. The software has started off on the wrong foot. How much of an issue is it really if someone gave the wrong details before downloading a trial. Is it really that important that you are able to keep bugging them via email to buy the product?

I was curious enough to jump through the hoops to download the product. The first thing I noticed is that there is no 64bit for Linux :-(. More steps involved in installing this on my 64bit machine. So instead, I installed it one of my 32bit machines - save time.

Once the download completed, the steps on the website suggested that I needed to configure it (with ./configureTasktop.sh) and then run Tasktop. The configuration step required no input from the user and outputted nothing. I have to ask:

1. Why is the configuration step not integrated into Tasktop and configured to run once? Alternatively,
2. Why does the configuration step, not start Tasktop right after.
3. Even better: Make Tasktop a symlink to configureTasktop.sh, which then relinks that to the Tasktop Binary with the configureTasktop running Tasktop right after. This means that from the users perspective, they are always running the same command, and you save any cost associated with run once checks.

I finally got Tasktop to run and it asks me if I want to install the firefox addon to integrate with Tasktop. I want to see how it integrates, so I do. Of course, this is yet another step.

A restart later, I was ready to try out Tasktop - or was I? We use bugzilla to track tasks and I wanted to integrate that in similar to how I do it in Eclipse. This was also trickier than I expected.

I went into the partner connectors section which did not cover bugzilla, which I assumed meant that it came with Bugzilla integration by default. This is true but how the hell do I get there to configure it. It took me a little while to find the configuration section (there are no menus). Once I was there, I wanted to get back to the original layout which was tricky since the "close configuration" button was nicely hidden away up at the top right.

Once I had this working, I tried out the active/deactive mechanisms and this works just the same as in Eclipse. Except with the Firefox plugin, it adds in the links that you browse as part of your context - GREAT!

Add in a task to blog about it and went through writing half the document, then decided to de-activate it before I started working on something else. All the firefox tabs were closed - again, great...

The problem is that when you re-activate the context, it just clears the tabs in firefox and shows you the links you last had open. The page titles for the pages that I had open were the same for a few, so going through them trial and error to get to the blog post was tricky. More importantly, the cookie was already gone and I had to re-login. This might be a timeout issue with Wordpress so wont tag that against Tasktop.

I haven't tried linking folders / files yet but considering that with the above process taking me more time than I expected due to the sheer number of steps involved, I shall have to leave that to another day. In all honesty, it might never happen.

I do like the time logging feature of Tasktop as it tells me which tasks I spent my time on in different chart formats. This is great. However, I have a problem in that this is on an individual basis. I see nothing on here about how a team leader can link in Tasktop used by the team to calculate total time spent on a project / task. This is a necessary feature for a tool like this in the team environment.

It is possible that all of this is easier in a windows environment. Possibly because it was built on there, but more likely because Windows users are used to taking several steps to achieve something (what is it - 7 clicks to delete a file in Vista?)

Having ranted on for a while, dont get me wrong. I think that Tasktop is a fantastic concept and with a bunch of tweaking can be a very intuitive tool to use. However, at the stage that it is in, it does not do what I need it to do. It is actually more obtrusive than useful (e.g. by removing all my tabs from firefox when switching out of a context and not re-instating them on going back to the context).

Then, it is probably just because I simply expect too much... :-(

The Project aim was to bring together the easy time logging capabilities of Process Dashboard along with the project management capabilities of Microsoft Project (including the Server Component). It is also to be integrated into our request tracking System - Request Tracker. Eventually, it is also to integrate with our accounting system and turn into an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system and MIS (Management Information System). There are plans to integrate with our Wiki and our Document Management System too.

But these are all lofty goals.  One of our recent projects introduced me to the Spring Framework. While I am still not a fan of Spring, the scale of the project and the way of approaching it gave me some ideas and additional tools to work with. I wanted to bring these into the InVision Project.

The key one here was Maven 2. InVision already used EJB3 and JBoss (4.2 as it happened). There was one additional issue for me to resolve and that was out of container testing. Something that is very easy to do with Spring but a little more troublesome with EJB3 since it doesn’t have an out of container framework…

I have grown to be a big fan of Maven 2 and using Maven 2 to configure an EJB project is not as easy or straightforward as I would have liked: I wanted to separate the whole project into four parts

• Domain Model (or just the entity beans); Also referred to as a Hibernate Archive (HAR)
• Stateful/Stateless Beans (Just the Beans, since I don’t consider entities beans in EJB3)
• Application Client (J2SE Application)
• Web App (Using SEAM)
• I would also need an EAR project to deploy the DomainModel, Beans & WebApp as one pacakge into JBoss.

I have not got as far as the SEAM project yet but the other ones were straightforward enough to set up with Maven 2.

Both the Domain Model and the Beans project had to be set up as ejb projects and use the maven-ejb-plugin

I set up the persistence context within the Domain Model

I could then reference the context from the Beans project by injecting it with

Easy enough!

Now configuring the EAR project: This was configured as an ear package which depended on the other two projects with the following configuration

With this configured, from the EAR project, I could do mvn ear:deploy to deploy to JBoss.

Additionally, within eclipse, I created a new run-type that ran ear:undeploy package ear:deploy to re-deploy the package to JBoss. Works a treat

There are still a few kinks to be ironed out.

I still need to install (mvn install) the two projects before the EAR will pick it up to deploy. I need to get the ear re-deploy to re-build the other projects. Something to look at another day.

I had manually deployed the DataSource file to JBoss. It might be possible to do this via Maven.

I also very much liked the Eclipse automatic deploy feature. It is possible to use the eclipse plugin on maven to get Eclipse to identify this as a JBoss deployable project but I ran into some problems and gave up. Ideally, Eclipse would auto-deploy the project.

However, the above is less relevant once Out-Of-Container testing is in place. Now, this does work, but I will leave that to another day…

In the open source world, I expect that all things which are accessible as 32bit are also accessible and 64bit and ubuntu makes it automagic enough that everything just works. Yes, I run into problems with closed source software like Flash Player (recently resolved with flash player 10) and the Java Plugin but that is another story. I use Eclipse and wanted to do some performance analysis and benchmarking to find a bottleneck and installed the TPTP plugin; and ran into a problem. It just didn’t work.

To resolve it, I turned to google… In this instance, it turned out to be a distraction and a red-herring. It lead me in the direction of installing libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2_2.95.4-27_i386.deb which was difficult at best since there was only a 32bit version of the package and that wasn’t even in the standard repository.

In the end, digging deeper, I found that it simply missed the following shared object libstdc++.so.5.

All I had to do was install libstdc++5:

and it worked… :-D

Now, I think that ACServer which Eclipse uses to do TPTP should not link to an outdated library but that is another issue…