Ant and Me

At last the project release is over. The web services I have created are now ready and functional and have been merged to the main branch. Thanks to my mentor for being there when I have tons of questions in my mind. Though some of which are manageable, most of them were really system specific behavior. I even had a hard time during those days because of their ant builds - trust me the builds were crazy. I even broke some of them and spent countless hours checking where or what caused it and fix them to the point of doing overtime. I wondered what if we were using Apache Maven. Is it really a good idea then to use Maven for this?

Anyway I did some readings regarding build and repository managers and found out this software called, "buildr". It's claiming and attested by some software developers that it's a really great product and it's 50% faster than Apache Maven. That's just awesome I guess. I want to try this tool some other time because this week as in right now, my schedule and load is coming back to not being person friendly - I don't know if there is such. The last week was terrible but then this week, they are giving me a "priority task". It's going to be another service for which will function in lieu of the former service I created once the information there expired during the session. Bug me! I do get what services right now but hell don't get why do they have to create a service because the session times out? why not store it as a session in the server instead or cookie to the clients computer and just delete the cookie after the client has timed out. But I'm not the architect, so I don't know what I'm talking about. I have to admit that the suggestion I did doesn't sound viable for maybe it has so many unproven issues. Anyway I'm working on this service and wasn't convinced with its implementation. So that was a show stopper for my coding job. I wasn't able to even materialize what I was supposed to do but at least the classes were there but with out substance. What I did in order to feel better was finished the unit tests and system test which were affected by the overhaul which we term in computer lingo as refactoring. It was crazy since the previous developer resigned like months ago and because I wasn't the one who created them, I have to peruse every detail of code and made sense with it. I was able to get it though. I finished just right now the failing unit tests and system tests. But my guess it that some issues will again arise on the unit tests because of this new service that I will be making. Indeed so much work to do. And beat this task at hand was assigned to me which I have to finish by next week Friday. Anyway, my mentor approached me and gave a background on the service which I will be making. Hope everything has sank into my system and my subconscious will act and work on it laboriously so by the time my senses has caught me up, everything will just be encoded even if it's just rote. I can deal with that!

Going back to the build tool we are using, ant is making my world crazy. The code is becoming dirty and less friendly. Just a thought, when will this project use better build tools and stuff? Or do they even care to consider changing their build tool? Worse, they don't know of any better build tool - that's outrageous! The one thing that's a little disappointing is that they have identified that their ant builds are getting some kind of slow and stuff yet they are not planning of changing it. So I guess they don't see the other side of the one peso coin, the what-if just what if they were using another tool. I'm just a little affected by it because they were having some Ant 101 just to inform us on how to make builds faster.

Anyway it's getting a little late so I need to sign out :) My friends are actually waiting already at Greenbelt for a karaoke session. I just thought of writing this rant once and for all so I can move on. I just need to go with the flow as to how this legacy system was designed. I just thought that their build design is a not so okay (I would have written a little inferior to be honest but I need to be as considerate as possible as I have promised my self - Wahahaha! there you go I blew it up.).