Thoughts on agile software development
Some time ago, I had the idea that a checksum calculation could be added to the FreshMarker File library. FreshMarker File is an extension for FreshMarker to support the Java types File and Path. A checksum support would allow the current checksum to be added to lists of files without any major detours. The idea is quite simple. A corresponding built-in is appended behind a file or path variable.
While searching for a name for the new project, I looked up the inventor of charts for fun. I was amazed to find that this person actually existed. William Playfair (born September 22, 1759, near Dundee, Scotland; † February 11, 1823 in Covent Garden, London, England) is a pioneer of information graphics and is considered the inventor of bar and pie charts. What an unexpected opportunity to honor this man. The name also fits perfectly with an open source project that aims to provide simple charts without a lot of fuss. This article shows what has changed since the first bar chart and how much Java takes off our hands.
I recently sat in a lecture about PlantUML and the advantages of Diagram As Code. Diagram As Code is a special variant of Documentation As Code. It is the possibility for software developers to create their documentation in the form of text files without the use of word processing systems. The advantage is obvious, the developer can use his documentation like his source code. Versioning, automatically creating comparisons, transforming, validating and much more. This gave me the idea of developing something similar.
The FreshMarker Switch Directive is an unusual representative of its kind. Since it has been implemented according to the possibilities of its syntax description in the CongoCC example source code, it is capable of quite unusual working methods. Some special cases could be processed faster with an optimized version. Therefore, the Switch Directive is optimized for constants in this article.
Some algorithms are real classics and yet nobody really knows them. Day in, day out, everyone is happy about the beautiful wrapping of their text in the word processor, but why does the text actually look so beautiful spread across the lines?
The title of this article is no mistake. Anyone who has looked at the FreshMarker Random plugin recently will probably have discovered the new sentence and paragraph built-ins. These two bilt-ins support the library with the generation of the famous Lorem Ipsum pseudo-texts. Without delving deep into history, the Lorem Ipsum texts are a corruption of a Cicero text and serve as dummy texts.
A fundamental assumption of software developers is that the system libraries are error-free and perform well. Every now and then you are taught better, but after a while the memories fade and you hang on to the original misconceptions.
FreshMarker is quite a small library, about 475 KB in size. Therefore there is always room to make a few small additions. One of these is the display of numbers and loop variables with Roman numerals.
With Partial Template Reduction, the template is filled with a fraction of the necessary data and thus simplified as far as possible. This articel presents the first part of the implementation.
The Rocinante library has now passed some important milestones. It can read and write messages and masters the scalar base types. The next step is now to support Repeated Fields. Repeated fields are the Protocol Buffer counterpart to lists and arrays in other protocols.