I really like how Fitnesse is doing these days (I even subscribed to the mailing list, which I had not considered last year, for example). Bob Martin is adding features every few weeks. It is great!
In the release he did a couple of days ago, he added 2 interesting things:
- one is a format tool that helps giving a more readable view of your tables, in editing mode; unfortunately, your edit panel must be using a fixed-size font (which it is not the case by default on my system)
- the most interesting addition, though, is the support of SCM tools to store wiki pages
There are two ways to configure a SCM tool.
The first is to specify it on the command line:
java -DCM_SYSTEM=package.to.AParticularCmSystemIntegrationClass -jar fitnesse.jar
The second is to specify in a high-level page on your hierarchy of pages:
!define CM_SYSTEM {com.project.fitnesse.OurSvnSystem me/my_password /cm/myRespository}
This one is interesting, because it allows you to have different configurations for different hierarchies of pages (typically one for each different projects, or even for different versions of the same project).
The bad news, though, is that the CM System Integration class in question is not provided by default, though I’m sure that in time there will be all sorts of appropriate integration classes provided with Fitnesse. But that’s not the case so far (except for an example made to connect to Git — not sure how generic it is). That said, it does seem quite easy to implement that class (you basically need to implement calls to the command line in Java).
You might want to download the Fitnesse release and check out the FitNesse.UserGuide.SourceCodeControl page. As often with Fitnesse, the website does not have the latest details.
A fun evening last Tuesday at the Paris Java User Group. It was the first year anniversary, so special events were planned.
The highlight was the introduction of ALL French JUGs (all created shortly after Paris JUG was). More than a year ago, there was not a single JUG in France, there are now in total 9: Rennes, Nice, Bordeaux, Tours, Nancy/Metz, Toulouse, Lyon, Nantes, plus, of course Paris (and Luxembourg, Switzerland and Belgium, also represented that evening). There is little doubt that other major French cities will have their own JUG soon, especially Lille and Marseille.
The organizers gave a couple of interesting statistics:
- the typical participant at Paris JUG is a Java architect more than 30 years old; this is in contrast to other local JUGs in France which have sometimes 50% students in the audience
- the users mailing list (voluntary subscription only) has around 180 members
- the announce mailing list (automatic subscription when registering to any evening) has more than 1100 members; however, only the organizers can post to it and only announcements of events organized by Paris JUG are made there
- the number of people registering to a Paris JUG is reaching 220 (more than 200 since September); unfortunately, with 175 available seats, this means that they will have to limit the number of participants in the coming evenings
- more than 1500 visitors / month to their website
There were also a few technical presentations, on subject such as Wicket, Java 7 and JOGL, but the most impressive one was for the version 3 (not currently available) of Parleys. Stephan Janssen did an impressive job, first with clients programmed in Flex, Java FX and GWT, second with an almost magic movie editor that matched videos of presentations with slides automatically. That could solve quite a few problems we have with our own conferences at Valtech. Extremely good stuff, as Londoners would say!
For more about this evening at Paris JUG, check out:
