I'm hearing the phrase User Experience thrown around quite a bit these days. It's become an overloaded term that means different things to different folks, yet we all seem to agree with the premise that a positive user experience is essential.

So, I was going through a stack of podcasts that had piled up. One of them was an interview with Zed Shaw (creator of Mongrel) at http://ajaxian.com/podcast/. He pontificates about a number of things. It's an hour long, but of particular interest to me was when he was talking about the old Rails-In-The-Enterprise debate. He mentioned three key barriers to Rails in this area:
1. EAI (i.e. interfacing w/ legacy apps, arcane data sources, etc)
2. Authentication (very limited support now)
3. a Rails stack with good management tools (the JBoss or Websphere of Rails, as he puts it)

If you are using Rails 2.0.2 you may notice that you get an Internal Server Error when you do something like this:

<%# fields_for "child[]", Interest.new do |f|%>
<%= f.text_field :name %>
<%= f.date_select :birth %>
<%# end %>

I'm doing something similar to that example and I found out there is a patch scheduled for rails 2.0.3. If you can't wait for the fix then you can add the patch to the stable code base yourself (unfortunately, the fix isn't available in "edge rails" yet).

Often in the IT industry publications one reads about horror stories regarding failed projects. Most often the failure is due to bad or misaligned requirements.

A May 2007 CIO magazine article presents studies about how agile development works and can help in aligning technology with business needs/vision.

I recently read a Coding Horror blog post about how, as a user of free software, one ought to seriously consider donating money to the software's authors. Jeff gave the application Paint.NET as an example, also mentioning just how awesome of an application it was in general. I needed to create some screenshots for a project I was working on, so I thought I'd give MSPaint a rest and give this new-fangled Paint.NET a try.

I've been working in parallel with two other developers on creating sequence diagrams from use cases. What follows are merely some experiential observations, I'm by no means a UML subject matter expert!

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/

What does the new Adobe Apollo framework and runtime spell for future Swing development? With soo many people out there who already know flash/adobe products Apollo could capture quite a bit of the market.

This is not to say Apollo will replace enterprise level Swing devlelopment... but maybe it can? Send some simple requests to a smart backend server on the enterprise that does the heavy work and returns results to the view??? (leave comments)

Jalopy is a Java source code formatter, which has a plug-in for Ant. Most modern IDE already includes source code formatting functionality. However, having a common source code formatter for the whole team, integrated in the build process, provides a standardized style formatting.

After downloading the Jalopy Ant plug-in, place the jar files in your project directory. Personally, I am happy with the default style. However, if you would like to customize the style, for example adding javadoc, you can use the preference.bat or preference.sh executable that comes with the download. You can export the style you customized to an xml file, which can be placed in your project directory and referenced in your ant task.

Web development using Internet Explorer is often a more painful endeavour than developing with Firefox due to the lack of development tools in IE compared to Firefox.  If requirements dictate Internet Explorer, the Fiddler add-on for IE provides valuable capabilities for inspecting the details of HTTP connections.  From the website, "Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data."

I have recently worked on a project that used the Scrum model of software development, and here are some of my observations and thoughts about it.

From the Scrum website: “Scrum is an agile, lightweight process that can be used to manage and control software and product development using iterative, incremental practices.”

Scrum advocates short iterations (“Sprints” in Scrum terminology) and short daily 15 minutes meetings (“Scrum Meetings”). Scrum also uses a Burn-down chart to keep track of outstanding tasks for each Sprint, each release and the product/project as a whole. The idea is to be able to easily and accurately determine the status of development.