Brugge Blog

In the world of Java development, the two top choices for build tools are Ant and Maven. Like Coke and Pepsi, or any other good two-headed field, the choice provides endless voice to discussions of which is better. What is interesting to me in the threads, though, is that when people praise or defile Maven, […]

Dashboards are in. Dashboards are happening. It’s what automation is supposed to be about: to be the crowbar against an accumulation of feedback. Getting data is the first step, being able to interpret it is where the action starts.
I’ve wanted to have an all-in-one-page view of a project’s metrics for years now, ever since seeing […]

Nobody really trusts a 1.0 release, but you have to start somewhere to get the tires kicked. To that end, I’ve updated Glean with fixes for a couple of the tool scripts and added some new tools, and am cutting that as a 1.1 release. No need to put off using it any more.
The new […]

I’ve written a small framework of Ant scripts, that I call Glean, that drive a set of open-source tools to generate source code analysis, documentation and metrics for Java projects. It’s available for download, and distributed under an MIT License.
For starters, I have scripts packaged to drive a number of tools that can give you […]

Javadoc is an amazing tool. It’s hard to imagine dealing with the Java libraries, let alone any other component or project API, without it. One thing that’s annoying, though, is that it is chatty, and it is hard to tell it “do your job, and don’t tell me all of the things you want to […]

I started checking out StatSVN a few months ago, and have since been able to set it up for a couple of projects. I’ve got to say that the developers have been very helpful in resolving a couple of problems quickly, and have even gone and added some really interesting features, like a code churn […]

It seems like a number of tools I use or have wanted are getting released, updated or just kicked off recently. The latest I found is StatSVN, a slick tool for documenting the activity on an Subversion repository.
It looks like this is a fork of StatCVS that started as a university project. This one is […]

Nicely in the spirit of Live CDs, ThoughtWorks has given build masters an interesting jumpstart: Buildix. Sure, it’s more than just a build master tool, since it’s aimed at creating a whole team support environment (Subversion source control, Trac bug tracking/wiki, and CruiseControl for builds), but the person who typically sets these things up is […]

I like pleasant surprises. In the world of software tools, those are when I come across something that I thought didn’t exist, or wouldn’t exist for the forseeable future. For code coverage tools, I’ve been using Emma for a few years, and stopped checking for Eclipse plugins long ago, but now one has magically appeared: […]

The name draws you in, then the concept hooks you: a dynamic language modeled on concepts from Python and Ruby but with its roots (and branches) in Java. Groovy just sounds very fun, to the ear and to the Java-edged mind. With languages like these graduating from “scripting languages” or “little languages” to the more […]