schmidthappens.de

Announcing [lao] – An online collaboration platform

Schmiddy — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:51:13 +0000

This semester Siamak Haschemi asked me to assume a project in the course Software Project I (the course is divided in two parts and last a whole year). Goal of this course is to teach the students how to work in teams over a longer distance. For this purpose he invited several companies to put some project ideas to the students. He also asked me to make a proposal for the course. My project idea was chosen by six students, who will develope the system. The process model for the development process will be Scrum, an agile method to managing tasks in teams.

The project I suggest is a multi-user online colaboration software. The name of the project ist [lao]. [lao] is an acronym for look ahead online. The purpose of the software product is to allow persons to collect informations in the pre-project phase. At the beginning I will let the team run more free so that they can develop own ideas. Additionaly I don’t want to prescribe the selection of technologies.

Today I met the team and they seemed to be very enthusiastic. I introduced myself as the product owner and gave them the first user stories. For the Scrum process they will use the tool ScrumDo. I hope I can see some planning results in the next two weeks. At this point I will take the challenge and hope that I can publish some stories about the development process.

Google+ Developer Feed

Schmiddy — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 19:08:33 +0000

Google+ is Google’s attempt to establish his own social community. At the moment Google+ is in a beta state and not open for everybody, but I’m already in because of an invitation. Google is not just another Facebook or Orkut. It allows to seperate contacts in different circles. But you can not only sepereate your contact, you can also share your informations depending on the circles you created. At this point it feels more like a real social network. Like in real life I can seperate e.g. my family, friends and colleagues.
As a developer I’m interested to see an API for the use of Google+ . For this point Google shares informations about it over this site:

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/plusdevelopers/

In Addition: My Blog supports now the “+1″

Participated at Eclipse Demo Camp 2011 @ Berlin

Schmiddy — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:16:05 +0000

Yesterday I visited the Eclipse Demo Camp in Berlin. The event took place on the Campus Charité Mitte. Since the beginning of my master thesis I somehow get drawn in the Eclipse Community. There are many nice tools, which can enhance the work for us developers. The schedule for the presentations can be found here.

At this point I shortly want to introduce some frameworks/apps that impressed me yesterday.

Model-based, Cross-Platform development for mobile phones: APPlause

Applause provides a DSL for the creation of native apps for Android, iOS, Windows 7, Symbian and other technologies. For me it was nice to see that the guys of Itemis are using their own technologies – in this case Xtext and Xpand – for the development of such tools.

For a deeper look, Heiko Behrens held a full hour presentation at the MobileTech Conference 2010. The video can be seen here.

Round-trip-engineering in teams with UML Lab

Another compelling application is UML Lab. The developer of Yatta presented an intuitive tool chain for the handling of UML diagrams. Moreover it allows reverse-engineering, so that a developer can pull out the architecture of his code graphically. But the main feature I saw, was the possiblity to use version control systems and merge on the layer of diagrams – not text-based on the code.

Finally, I would like to thank the organizers and speakers. Great Evening

Running Hazelcast node on an Amazon EC2 instance

Schmiddy — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:01:20 +0000

In this little tutorial I will show how simple it is to run an Hazelcast instance on an Amazon EC2 node.
The first thing we will do is launching a new EC2 node.
For doing this go to your AWS Management Console and select the Amazon EC2 tab.
On the Dashboard you will see a fancy really big (Launch Instance) button. Click on it and follow the instructions. For this tutorial I suppose to choose the following kind of an EC2 node:

Basic 32-bit Amazon Linux AMI 1.0
Instance Type: Micro (t1.mircro, 613 MB)

After doing this, the new instance is started.
Make sure that you safe the key file, which was produced during this process.

So now we can connect to the new Linux (EC2) instance via SSH.
If you’re already working on a UNIX system, you can use in a terminal

[sourcecode language="bash" light="true"]
~# ssh -i {path to your keyfile} ec2-user@{public DNS of EC2 node}
[/sourcecode]

If you’re using Windows, then you can use PuTTY following this tutorial
http://www.powercram.com/2009/07/connecting-to-aws-ec2-instance-linux.html

Now you should be connected with your EC2 instance. The next thing we will do is installing Hazelcast.
So first we have to download the actual version which can be found here.
Just start

[sourcecode language="bash" light="true"]
~# wget http://www.hazelcast.com/files/hazelcast-1.9.zip
[/sourcecode]

Then do the execute the following commands

[sourcecode language="bash" light="true"]
~# unzip -x hazelcast-1.9.zip
~# rm hazelcast-1.9.zip
~# cd hazelcast-1.9/bin/
[/sourcecode]

Now we’ll have to modify the configuration file of Hazelcast hazelcast.xml
Here I made the easiest config I could imagine.

[sourcecode language="xml"]

dev
dev-pass

5701

224.2.2.3
54327

{master_ip_here}

10.*.*.*

1
NONE
0
25

[/sourcecode]

For the first time you can copy this configuration, but you have to edit this line to point at your Hazelcast master node

[sourcecode language="xml" light="true"]{master_ip_here}[/sourcecode]

If your gonna running Hazelcast on a single instance you can leave this blank or filling it with 127.0.0.1
After doing this be sure that your master node is already running.

So now you can start you Hazelcast instance like this

[sourcecode language="bash" light="true"]~/hazelcast-1.9/bin# sh run.sh[/sourcecode]

This is the output

[sourcecode language="bash" light="true"]
10.12.2010 15:50:02 com.hazelcast.config.XmlConfigBuilder
INFO: Using configuration file at /root/hazelcast-1.9/bin/hazelcast.xml
10.12.2010 15:50:03 com.hazelcast.system
INFO: [dev] Hazelcast 1.9 (20100912) starting at Address[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:5701]
10.12.2010 15:50:03 com.hazelcast.system
INFO: [dev] Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Hazelcast.com
10.12.2010 15:50:03 com.hazelcast.impl.LifecycleServiceImpl
INFO: [dev] Address[10.10.1.1:5701] is STARTING
10.12.2010 15:50:04 com.hazelcast.impl.Node
INFO: [dev]

Members [2] {
Member [{master_ip}:5071]
Member [10.10.1.1:5701] this
}

10.12.2010 15:50:04 com.hazelcast.impl.LifecycleServiceImpl
INFO: [dev] Address[85.214.131.218:5701] is STARTED
hazelcast[default] >
[/sourcecode]

Congratulation your Hazelcast node is running