Extreme Programming and Weblogic Portal

Some thoughts on using XP practices when having to develop on weblogic portal(7.0 sp2)
Unit Tests
How do you test webflows without writing a whole framework from scratch(mock objects or otherwise). when the time given for you to develop your application is about half of what it should be(at least!) do you have the time to write these kind of frameworks? why doesnt BEA provide some framework for unit testing IP/PC's out of the box. This should probably improve when portal moves over to struts completely since these things are available with struts
Moral of the story ? Use struts. But we cant always shift to better software. So whats the alternative besides not unit testing your code?have as little of it as possible in propietary interfaces/components(in this case pipeline components , ips) and have as little of these components as possible. Unfortunately i violate these principles on a regular basis.
Small incremental Changes to code, then tests
If you work in environments similar as i do , where the hardware for developers are limited and you have to share instances of weblogic portal with other developers due to licensing and budget limitations you have probably run into problems while following this.
a small change like adding a log4j debug statment takes about half an hour , due to the exceptionally slow time it takes to undeploy/deploy ejbs etc to the server. Couple this with the buggy behaviour(which has improved from 4.0)that sometimes you have to undeploy the whole application because of the classlaoder hierarachy means a long wait.
Moral of the story ? start your own blog and use the time to write rants.

Calvin and Hobbes

This line from Calvin and Hobbes so accurately describes me.
The strength to change what i can,The inability to accept what i cant, and the incapacity to tell the difference
On which topic, it is just so sad that Bill watterson stopped writing calvin and hobbes, but after rereading most of the collected volumes and all that he has said on the matter and especially the last strip
Its a magical word out there, Hobbes old buddy, lets go exploring. I do finally understand and its what i intend to do as well

Sue Spielman on Outsourcing

Well i couldnt resist. I said i wouldnt visit this blog again, but i did.
Outsourcing in my company? I don't think so.
The thread has degenerated into what i thought it would. The only person i seem to agree with is Frank Sommers.
Everyone will (i hope) agree that a problem exists. People losing their jobs anywhere is not particularly pleasant. However most of the "solutions"
do not seem to address the problem and the others are mainly offtopic. Where is the software engineering process of mapping out requirements and the way the proposed solution satisfies the requirements. Where is the impact on other systems etc?
The irony is that most of the people visiting this blog are software engineers and are involved in design/development etc. of systems. If we cant sit and come up with effective solutions that keep most people happy, what does that say for our system architect capabilities?.