ConEmu Tasks

I've been using this for a few months now and whilst my usage isn't massive, I do tend to use the command line about once a day.

Here's some of my most used tasks:

setEnv

I wrote an environment configuration script in a previous post that I want to be called when I open ConEmu. The picture above shows how.

Git Bash

My VCS of choice is Git and it comes with Git Bash to allow me to call some of my favourite Git commands. Here's how that's integrated into ConEmu.

setWLSEnv

Finally, I use Weblogic for a lot of my Java EE container needs. To set the system path and classpath Weblogic comes with a setWLSEnv script. In a similar way to calling my own, here I simply call the setWLSEnv script provided by Weblogic.

Gradle Wrapper and proxy issues

I wanted to use the Gradle Wrapper, but wanted to keep the download internal to avoid having to expose proxy setting in the gradlew scripts.

The change was quite simple. We hosted the files on a staging server (Windows) and simply changed the gradle-wrapper.properties to the following:

Gradle task rule for Selenium testing

I've been working quite closely with one of the testers who's written a test suite using Selenium. He had initially wrote a single gradle task for each browser.

As i hope you can see its a little clunky:


So, I set out to make this more flexible and minimize the amount of code in the build file. Using rules which are provided by the Gradle API I was able to write the following task:


Now all thats required is "gradle intTestChrome" or "gradle intTestFirefox".... perfect!

Gradle Logging - writing to a log to file

This simple Gist adds 2 additional output listeners; Standard Out and Standard Error and pipes their output to a build log.

Groovy Timestamp

There's small changes you make when developing that you often disregard as too simple to matter. One such example is shown below.

Dates should be ordered: YEAR, MONTH, DAY. (e.g. YYYYMMDD, YYMMDD, YYYYMM). Time should be ordered: HOUR, MINUTES, SECONDS (HHMMSS). The reason for this is that files will always be sorted in correct chronological order.

As a build manager I use this most in my Gradle scripts for ordering the build output logs.

Debugging Service Oriented Architecture

Service oriented architecture is really starting to take flight in my organisation, but despite how mesmerising this new architecture is, its worth noting how much more difficult debugging has become.

I am telling this story as a build manager, and not a developer. The application is simple; Spring MVC front end, a service bus and a hand full of services (one for getting bank details, addresses and a third for generating documents).

SOA favours buy over build, and that is indeed what we did; in most cases we purchased off the shelf web services, the UI was developed by a third party, and the service bus was configured internally.

Round 1 of the build involved deploying the application and its stubs. This went well and we were able to successfully run through the customer journey. As the stubs were developed by the team writing the front end, they had a great deal of control over what the stubs done - our developers provided the WSDL and the third party developed to that spec.

Round 2 started integrating the service bus, and each service being sure not to add too many variables at once. Defects were raised, but for the most part this was pretty successful too. The early exchange of the WSDL meant we were all singing off the same hymn sheet.

Round 3 is when we finished adding new features, changed WSDL's and started hammering through the defects list. This is where the problems started. The interesting thing here is that because you have a lightly coupled architecture its easy to lose track of what each person is working on. We had one regression with the address lookup feature which we instantly put down to the new build of the UI - in actual fact the problem was due to the service bus not changing the config to take the change made to the UI. Whilst the problem sounds simple, it involved a lot of running around between different teams trying to isolate the problem, and because SOA is still maturing (as are the staff working around it) governance is still a little thin on the ground.

GET YOUR GOVERNANCE IN EARLY!

Oracle DB Object - Gists

Select all invalid objects:


Recompile all invalid objects:




One of the really annoying things about Oracle PL/SQL is the way it tells you something is wrong, gives you a line number and then leaves it up to you to find the statement that caused the error. Well, this little piece of SQL gives you the exact line in error plus the lines immediately before and after it. (Acknowledgements to Ken Atkins of ARIS Consulting).