Basil Vandegriend: Professional Software Development

The Apache Ant build tool is a great aid in automating builds and deployments. When the build fails, however, diagnosing the problem can be painful - especially if it only occurs intermittently. Logging details of the Ant build can therefore be useful.
By default Ant writes informational messages to the console. While this is usually sufficient […]

My appreciation of the power of search, particularly for developing software, has grown over the last few years. The wise use of search can significantly increase your effectiveness as a developer, acting like an amplifier or expansion unit for your brain. Search allows you to navigate faster, remember easier, and know more.
I spend most of […]

I am a big proponent of automating the building and deployment of application code: this minimizes the chance of human error and ensures a consistent process is followed. Last year I wrote an article about automatically deploying code via FTP using the Java-based Apache Ant build tool. Since then I have needed to deploy to […]

I have added a new WordPress plugin called Version Information to my Software page. This plugin displays version and configuration information for WordPress, PHP, MySQL, and the web server. A summary is displayed in the Site Admin dashboard and more details are displayed under a Version Information page under the Site Admin Plugins menu
This plugin […]

Here is a request to all vendors of development tools: please persist code to text files. Over the last few years, I have encountered an alarming number of tools that do not use text files. Some examples are:

A reporting tool that stores report definitions as binary files.
A data modeling tool that persists models as binary […]

I have added a new software utility called EnvGen to my Software page. EnvGen is an Ant task for generating different versions of the same file parameterized for different environments (i.e. development, test, and production). File generation is done using FreeMarker, a template engine with a full-featured templating language. You specify environment-specific properties in a […]

In my article on personal learning by doing, I wrote about the importance of personal development projects for professional development and mentioned that I maintain a complete development environment at home assembled from free, open-source tools. In this article I present the tools that I use and find the most valuable, focused particularly on Java […]

Subversion is open source version control software that has significantly gained in popularity over the last few years as a replacement for CVS. I have been using Subversion for a while for my personal projects at home. It has generally worked well, but I have encountered a few difficulties along the way.
One reason I like […]