http://www.summa-tech.com/blog Summa Blog Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:42:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Salesforce will officially put the Spring '12 release into the wild in early February. We've reviewed the official release notes in detail (get your own copy here). As the release approaches we've hit thebutton on five of the top features. This list is written from a user and administrator perspective ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2012/01/30/top-5-salesforce-spring-12-release-likes/ A lot of folks have used the Spring framework to build applications - and what's not to love? It's allowed us to solve enterprise problems with a minimum of tedium. And the framework has evolved to address criticisms, for example the continued reduction in need for lengthy XML configuration in ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2012/01/23/spring-batch-imperfect-yet-worthwhile/ In part 1 of this series, I discussed the benefits of usability testing on enterprise software projects and outlined a general approach for integrating the practice of usability testing into a typical Scrum project (see diagram below). In this post, I'll lay out a 3-step process for performing a ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2012/01/04/usability-testing-on-agile-projects-part-2/ Agile software development is about team code ownership, collaboration, and sharing ideas to get stuff done.  You want to ride the Agile wave, but half your team is in one city and the rest are in another.  How can you get your guys and gals to collaborate over the wire? ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/12/19/%e2%80%9cmy-scrum-master-is-in-a-different-time-zone-can-this-ever-work%e2%80%9d-or-4-tips-to-making-agile-work-with-a-distributed-team/ The Holidays are here! Soon snow will be falling, presents will be wrapped, and kids will be in line for Santa at the mall. I thought to myself, in this stressful/wonderful time of the year I would write a little light reading for the blog! I know that sometimes technical ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/12/12/12-days-of-a-consultant%e2%80%99s-christmas/ Here are four things in Java that might surprise you: 1. Polymorphism and Generics Polymorphism doesn't work the way you might expect with generics. For example, consider subtype polymorphism. Even though B is a subtype of A, and it is perfectly valid to say: A a = new B(); ...the following, however, would ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/12/05/four-java-surprises/ Part I: My K Volume There is an episode of the sitcom Friends where Joey is approached by a travelling encyclopedia salesman, offering to peddle him the entire collection of his wares, the complete Encyclopedia Britannica. Being a struggling actor and lacking the money, Joey opts to simply ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/11/28/the-power-of-functional-thinking-an-ode-in-fn-parts/ It is not enough that we deliver systems that are merely functional, they must also be usable. Paraphrasing from usability expert Jeff Attwood, to the users of the system, "the interface is the application"; it is their most visible window into our work. Whether we finish on time, on budget, ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/11/20/usability-testing-on-agile-projects-part-1/ A business rule management system (BRMS) is a software system used to define, deploy, execute, monitor and maintain variable and complex decision logic used by operational systems in an enterprise (Stineman, 2009). At a minimum, a BRMS is composed of the following components: Repository. It encapsulates the decision logic or rules, ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/11/10/de-mystify-the-benefits-of-brms/ Page Objects The Page Objects design pattern is outlined in the Selenium wiki, but to summarize, Page Objects are meant to encapsulate the messy internal state of a page. Changes in the presentation code should only require changes only to the Page Objects, not to the actual test code. ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/10/10/using-page-objects-with-selenium-and-web-driver-20/ One of the "softer" sides of development is time management. We do this on both a macro scale (project planning, estimates, what goes into the Sprint, etc.) and a micro scale (what am I going to work on today?). Most developers on most days are concerned with micro time management ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/10/04/micro-time-management-to-dos-and-to-donts/ September 2011 marks Summa’s 15th Anniversary and we have a lot of exciting things happening at the company. We’ve received accolades locally and nationally for our sales and employee growth, along with recognition of Summa as a great place to work. In August, Summa was ranked on the Inc 500|5000 list. ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/09/28/great-things-are-happening-at-summa/ When last we saw our hero, he was riding off into the sunset with Hibernate, his newfound love. The blogosphere was all abuzz. Would this new relationship blossom into something so well-known, tabloids would invent a new name for it? (HibeAyersnate? JBAyers?). Or would ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/09/12/chicken-soup-for-the-caching-soul/ Most of an enterprise application developer’s exposure to the database is primarily restricted to basic DDL, CRUD operations and occasional SQL tuning. So when I recently got a chance to use some not-so-common Oracle functions/statements in a data-migration project, I thought they might be worth sharing. Here they are: 1. ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/09/06/five-oracle-functions-you-might-find-useful/ Introduction When using the Java Persistence Architecture (JPA) to perform object-relational mapping, it can become difficult to manage entities with complex keys.  Having a unique identifier is a keystone of the mapping approach, and complex keys can make coding awkward and difficult.  An alternative is to create entities with sequential unique ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/07/29/setting-up-sequential-ids-using-jpa-tablegenerator/ In every enterprise application, there exists reference data - those simple entities that live on the periphery of your data model, and are used to classify your master data. We often know these entities by other names (depending on our point of view), for instance "lookup tables", "configuration data", ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/07/25/reference-data-in-the-application-tier/ This is the third in the Mvp4g Multiple Presenters series (part 1 and part 2). In this post I will demonstrate how to use the GWT generator to differentiate events that are to be filtered by an event group. This gives you more freedom when defining your events and gets ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/06/29/mvp4g-multiple-presenters-part-3/ It is an interesting problem: even though the Java primitive double type has plenty of precision, math operations using this type can prove problematic when it comes to using them for precision calculations.  Due to the nature of how floating point numbers are stored, they are by definition inaccurate.  This ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/06/13/tweaking-persistence-with-prepersist/ I’ll admit I was wrong. For years, I have been beating the drum about town, proselytizing my distaste for Hibernate. I told everyone that would listen what my opinions were. ‘It only gets in the way’, I said. ‘Its too much of a black box’. And while some of ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/06/07/dr-mindbender-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-hibernate/ I am back again to finish my top 12 list! I know, I know, Part 1 only had 5 items; but hey I saved the best 7 for last! Just to summarize, I am trying to give others out there who are new to the consulting world a view of ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2011/05/27/12-things-i-learned-about-consulting-in-12-months-part-2/