[NFJS Denver] Friday Wrapup
After slipping out of Bruce Tate's Spring talk, I headed into Dave Thomas's Advanced Version Control talk. I was going to blog it in real-time, but his talk was full of tips-n-tricks and there was just too much information. He showed us how its possible to use CVS to "undo" things and how the "magic -j" option allows you to easily merge experimental branches, as well as undo certain time periods of code. It seems that CVS is way more powerful than I ever knew and if you use a lot of tags and branches - it can be a very handy tool. The biggest thing I got out of this talk is that it's possible to do what I want to do at Java.net.
At java.net, they give you a CVS "module" for your project, rather than a CVS "repository" like SourceForge does. A couple of weeks ago, I decided it would be nice to arrange AppFuse's CVS so it would be more similar to a repository. By default, java.net gives you a "www" folder in your project's module - and when I first imported AppFuse, I just included www as a folder in the appfuse (base) module. Since I want to add more modules, I figured it would be easy enough to move all the base appfuse stuff to an "appfuse" folder so I'd end up with:
appfuse (module) - appfuse - www
This achieved what I wanted (from a CVS viewpoint), but when I'd check everything out, I'd get "appfuse/appfuse" - which is not what I wanted. You can read more on java.net's forums. Anyway, I ended up backing out the change. After sitting through Dave's talk, I realized that it's easy to achieve what I wanted. I just need to get access to java.net's CVSROOT module and add a line to the "modules" file to say "appfuse appfuse/appfuse". Damn, I wish I would have known that a few weeks back.
After that, dinner was served (catered) by the hotel. After dinner, there was an Expert Panel Discussion - where the experts consisted of: Rick Hightower, Bruce Tate, Dennis Sosnoski, Bruce Snyder, Rod Cope, Dave Thomas and Daniel Steinberg. It was a good discussion, with topics ranging from EJB3 to .NET to dynamic configuration with scripting languages to JSR 175. A most enjoyable event. Following the discussion, a group of us headed over to the hotel bar and grabbed some beers. I got to sit next to Renee Dopplick, Dan Steinberg, Dave Thomas and Mike Clark. It was quite a treat. I didn't get home until midnight.
Today's sessions start in 45 minutes and that's about how long my commute it - I'd better get going!