Code Adept

As you may have heard, I am currently writing a book (http://manning.com/allmon) on how to integrate Flex into a Java based web application.  When we started this project, we had many ideas for what we were going to do for a sample application to use throughout the book.  Too many titles out there either use trivial or incomplete examples that work well to showcase as much of the technology as possible but usually fall short in giving the user a clear picture of how to develop an end-to-end solution.  So my co-author and I, through suggestion from a fellow developer, decided to base our sample application on the XPlanner project.

For those of you not familiar with XPlanner, it’s a project planning and tracking tool for agile development teams.  We decided on XPlanner because we felt like it would be a good project that could very well represent the typical type of project that would be a candidate for refactoring to include a Rich Client front-end.  It is a project that is not brand new, hasn’t been maintained in over a year, doesn’t have the latest versions of all the popular frameworks, and best of all; it was not designed with the intent of replacing the front-end with Flex.

Soon after I began spiking the sample code for our application, I discovered that a bug in the way Apache Axis handles SOAP inheritance would force us to not be able to connect to the Web Services without some modifications.  This is not including all the changes we would need to make to integrate the BlazeDS server with XPlanner so we could take advantage of the AMF binary protocol.  So we were forced to either host a modified version of the XPlanner sources ourselves, detail the changes that must be made in our book, or attempt to contact the XPlanner maintainers to get the changes introduced to the main project.  I really didn’t like the idea of forking the project, and felt that providing a patch and making the reader apply that patch before following along with the code examples was less than desirable also.  So I decided to attempt to contact the project maintainer, and after a couple of unsuccessful attempts I finally heard back from the maintainer Jacques.

So to make a long story short, it looks like I may be taking over maintenance for the XPlanner project.  I am currently working with Jacques to figure out what needs to be done in the short term to get the latest release out the door, which is over 2 years in the making.  I’m very excited about the opportunity to breathe some life back into the XPlanner project, and it would appear that the direction that I envisioned for XPlanner falls in line with the direction that Jacques was hopeful to take before other commitments tore him away from it.