Author Archives: Eric Lefevre-Ardant

About Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Independent technical consultant.

Oracle offers to buy BEA

Posted on October 15, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Yep, it appears that Oracle has made an hostile bid for BEA, the last major independent pure player in application servers. It’s interesting because Oracle has had its own (mostly ignored) Oracle Application Server (OAS). I guess they were only … Continue reading →

Posted in java, valtech | Comments Off

Signs from our internal OpenSpace Technology event

Posted on October 5, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

We did a rehearsal of our coming OpenSpace even at Valtech Days. The signs were “beta” versions of what we’ll get in two weeks. As a side note, we have also started displaying (and renewing) pictures of Valtech events on … Continue reading →

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CITCON Brussels Registrations are going nicely

Posted on October 2, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

We now have more than 80 registrants for CITCON Brussels, more than 2 weeks before the 19th. This year, I have volunteered to help organize registrations, so I get to see every single registration request. It’s interesting: sometimes, you don’t … Continue reading →

Posted in citcon, continuous integration, tdd, test | Comments Off

Xavier at AjaxWorld

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

I should have mentioned yesterday that my colleague Xavier Warzee is attending AjaxWorld. He has already started reporting from the sessions he has been to.

Posted in conferences | Comments Off

Sadek and Julien now attending JAOO

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Two of my colleagues are attending the JAOO conference in Denmark. I know they will be posting their thoughts on their blogs, so check them out: Sadek Drobi Julien Delhomme

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2 books: “Guns, Germs & Steel”, and “Good To Great”

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

This August, as I was vacationing in Malta, I grabbed Guns, Germs & Steel at a bookstore in the airport. It is a fascinating book that explains how the European civilization basically ended up dominating the rest of the world. … Continue reading →

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Estimates in everyday life

Posted on September 23, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

One thing that we teach in Agile courses is estimating. One technique is taken from Steve McConnell and called Count, Compute, and Judge. The idea is that, to make an estimate, you have 3 options. First, if you can Count, … Continue reading →

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Huckster

Posted on September 22, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Today, I played a bit with Huckster, a presentation tool designed by James Gosling. It’s intriguing: counter-intuitively, it does not have any kind of unique features (as you would expect from an outsider in the world of presentation tools). Its … Continue reading →

Posted in java, keep it simple | Comments Off

Valtech in Agile Journal

Posted on September 21, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Quote from Agile Journal, in their Agile 2007 conference report: “The best leadership came from the large ISVs (e.g., Yahoo, Google, BMC Software) and the boutique consultants (e.g., Valtech) who make their living running worldwide software organizations and who have … Continue reading →

Posted in agile, conferences, valtech | 1 Comment

How to use Maven with no shared repository

Posted on September 8, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

On the projects I work on, I always try to introduce Maven. Unfortunately, it is often impossible to get approval for a separate machine to be used as a repository. For open source packages, that is not really a problem … Continue reading →

Posted in maven | 2 Comments

Valtech Days 2007: October 23 & 24

Posted on September 7, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

The 3rd edition of the Valtech Days is taking place in Paris in October 23 & 24. It is going to be a great edition (hey, I’m helping to organize it! ;-) ); I had confirmation that Laurent Bossavit and … Continue reading →

Posted in agile, conferences, java, openspace, valtech | Comments Off

Unitils: a better Gienah?

Posted on September 6, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

On my current project, I am using Gienah as a way to integrate JUnit tests with Spring. I am rather pleased with the result, keeping my unit tests quite clean. I just heard today about Unitils, a more ambitious tool. … Continue reading →

Posted in hibernate, java, spring, test | Comments Off

CITCON Brussels October 19-20

Posted on August 27, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

This year, I am going to attend the conference on Continuous Integration and Testing, in Brussels on October 19-20. The last edition I’ve been to, in London last year, was enormous fun, so I cannot wait to get there. Join … Continue reading →

Posted in citcon, continuous integration, openspace, test | Comments Off

‘Matrix’ project building with Hudson

Posted on July 29, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

The crazy (8 releases in the past 30 days!) Hudson dev team has just introduced a new feature. They call it a ‘matrix project’. The idea is that a configuration would often be common to many builds. Say, one for … Continue reading →

Posted in continuous integration, hudson, java, maven, test | 1 Comment

Survey suggests high adoption rate of Agile

Posted on July 27, 2007 by Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Scott Ambler has put together a survey that shows surprisingly positive data regarding application of Agile in companies. Apparently, more than two thirds of respondents were already adopting Agile practices, and among them close to half were already on their … Continue reading →

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