Recently we upgraded redmine from 1.1.2 to 1.4.2. It was an activity that I had planned for a long time, but as usual things get in the way of doing that. Redmine, perhaps ruby on rails makes that easy for you, has a very well documented path for upgrades so the upgrade itself didn’t take very long, about half an hour. Of course I had run through the process already on a different machine to make sure we weren’t going to hit any odd snags due to the platform / ruby versions or whatever.

Our main development management tool is Redmine. It has been since December 2010. We tried a lot of tools before settling on redmine. It was the only one that we ended up going back to and using. If, after a month of trying to use something, you end up not using it, then either you’re too set in your ways, or the tool isn’t good enough. Our journey to settling on redmine as our web based project management tool is a long and chequered one, and it all started in 2010.

Our source code management tool of choice is Mercurial; which is a python based DVCS. We switched back in 2009 once we’d gotten fed up with CVS. There are still a few internal projects using CVS, but these days almost all the developers are using mercurial. People always ask why we never moved to subversion and generally my answer has always been because it’s not *significantly* better than CVS. Yes it is better, it might even be CVS done right (not that this is a good advertisement for subversion); but ultimately, I need to use it on the plane or during a proof of concept with no external network access and collaborative development has to take place.

When you have a team of people actively maintaining a code base, someone somewhere is going to break something. It’s unavoidable, skill levels, and interest levels in SCM tools vary massively. We tend to trust the people working on the codebase so more often than not everyone has push access to our repositories. That means mercurial is going to break, at some point, sometime. Just this last week, we had 2 SCM breakages in 2 separate projects, one of which I fixed, and the other was manually merged by the team of devs.

The infrastructure team that we have at Adaptris is great; but sometimes when they setup a new vm image for me, there’s some things that are not quite right. I guess it’s because I’m a very particular kind of guy when it comes to how machines are setup. I thought that I’d write about how the development machines are setup. They’re setup just so which means that I can get working on them straight away¹.

Our development machines are migrating to use CentOS 6 which is a source RPM rebuild of a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor; we still have quite a few machines that are based on Centos 5 but new machine deployments tend to be the latest stable release.

I’m never really been all that interested in data manipulation; one of my stock phrases is it’s just data¹. From an integration perspective I might never understand the business semantics around each field in your data file. The critical part of our work is to make sure that your data gets out of System A, and gets to System B in the right format. For me, the interesting part is always understanding the esoteric limitations or complexities around the communications protocol rather than the data formatting itself. This probably goes back to messing around with protocol analyzers and gender benders (not that kind; the kind that you fit to an RS232 port) when I first started.

Anyway, the adapter has an EDI transformation engine which can turn XML into its appropriate EDI representation; one of requirements of EDI is that you need to have a document number for each document. Most of the time, this needs to be generated by us as the original data doesn’t have it. Previously someone; they shall remain nameless (you know who you are); wrote a simplistic java class that wasn’t threadsafe, relied on lots of java behaviour that was prone to errors, to increment a number in a hashmap and this ended up being used in a number of mappings which are now being reviewed. The extensions provided by Xalan that enable behaviour this within a stylesheet is yet another reason why the adapter hasn’t quite moved away from Xalan yet.