JavaOne 2011 - Java Champion and Agile ALM expert Michael Hüttermann gave a session, "Agile Application Lifecycle Management (18180)" on Tues., Oct. 4, designed to help Java developers integrate flexible agile practices and lightweight tools into software development phases. Hüttermann is the author of Agile ALM and CEO of Systemtechnologie Hüttermann. 

He covered:

* Task-based development for aligning activities with tasks, resulting in traceable artifacts

* Advanced continuous integration, which involves frequently and systematically integrating, building, and testing applications

* Agile approaches to release, configuration, deployment, and requirements management

* State-of-the-art-tool chains

The standard criticism of ALM is that it causes vendor lock-in, which increases the overall cost of an application, leaving developers with the challenge of balancing the pluses and minuses of Agile ALM. While Hüttermann admits that this has traditionally been true, his conception of Agile ALM results in flexible, high-quality processes and tool chains that are sufficiently open to change to avoid lock-in. By relying on lightweight tool chains, developers can improve flexibility because they can readily replace small units of the overall infrastructure without touching other parts. One of the main purposes of Agile ALM is to minimize accidental complexity.

Among the take-aways from the session:

* Continuous integration (CI) refers to the automation of the build, test, and release process with the goal of integrating the activities of colleagues and the work items others produce. This can result in a build ecosystem in which a new-code commit directly triggers a continuous build.

* Agile ALM defines task-based activities that are aligned with requirements, which means the activities are linked to requirements and all changes are traceable to their requirements.

* Agile ALM Tools are no longer cumbersome, monolithic vehicles that can restrict development. They need no longer cover all facets of the ALM ecosystem. Mashups of lightweight, focused, service-oriented, customizable tools are gaining momentum. Developers should feel free to switch from one tool to another.

Agile ALM aficionados should check out the forthcoming Java Magazine article by Hüttermann, set for publication in the November/December issue. If you haven't registered for the magazine, run, don't walk. It's free!

And be on the look out for a forthcoming otn/java interview with Hüttermann as well.

Finally, this JavaOne 2011 presentation can also be viewed @ http://parleys.com/d/2666.

A very clear and detailed article by Julien Ponge, titled “Better Resource Management with Java SE 7: Beyond Syntactic Sugar,” presents the Java 7 answer to the automatic resource management problem in the form of a new language construct, proposed as part of Project Coin, called the try-with-resources statement.

Java applications frequently manipulate different types of resources such as files, streams, sockets, and database connections that require system resources for their operations. They must be managed with great care or risk having database connections and file descriptors remain open after an exception occurs elsewhere in the code. As a result, application servers may need frequent restarts due to resource exhaustion.

The article provides an overview of resource and exception management before explaining the essentials of try-with-resources statements. It then shows how a class can be made ready to support such statements, and concludes with a demystification of the syntactic sugar behind the language extension.

Ponge concludes that the try-with-resources construct “generates correct code on behalf of the developer, eliminating the need to write boilerplate code that is easy to get wrong. More importantly, this change has been accompanied with evolutions to attach one exception to another, thus providing an elegant solution to the well-known problem of exceptions masking each other.”

Read the rest of the article here.