Well, it turns out that managing a Rock Band is more time consuming than I first thought, especially if they're getting ready to release their first album. It also turns out that building Debian packages is hard as well, particularly if you're trying to set up a Jenkins CI system to automate the process. Despite all this, I'm only a few weeks behind my initially projected release date and I'm pretty excited to announce that the day has finally come and Version 1.0 of Valadate is now ready for public consumption! Read on to find out how you can get your hands on it...

Continue reading

Things have been moving quite quickly since I last posted, with the development branch really starting to take shape. Despite a hectic couple of weeks, both personally and professionally, I have still managed to find the time to implement a substantial amount of what is now shaping up to be the first release of Valadate. Read on to find out what those features are and when I'll be pressing the go button on Version 1.0.

Continue reading

After a short break to work on one of my other projects (a Rock 'n Roll band) and finish setting up Jenkins, I'm back at work on the project now officially known as Valadate. In this post I will go over integrating the original project's code as well as the first set of unit tests on which the new project will be based. Now that there's an actual Github repository, we can set up other ways for people to get involved as well. Read on to find out what they are...

Continue reading

Continuous Integration or CI is widely used in Test Driven Design for keeping the project's codebase tight, reducing errors and making sure there is always a working build available for deployment. Since once of the objectives of Valadate is to integrate with existing toolchains, I took a short DevOps break to set up Jenkins on a spare Raspberry Pi with some interesting results. Read on to see what they were...

Continue reading

Less than a week after my first post, the Requirements gathering is well under way and I'm itching to lay down some code. Agile planning doesn't mean no planning at all though, so there's a few more steps before I start pushing anything to Github. The Requirements still need to be prioritised so that most crucial features are the ones that get worked on first, and that should take place within the context of an overall System Architecture. Read on to see how that will take place and when I can start scratching that itch.

Continue reading

I was looking at the asteroid 131 Vala, the origin of the programming language's name, on the JPL Small Object Database when I heard the sad news of David Bowie's passing. I noticed that the venerable old Orbit Viewer applet was no longer working and I wanted to watch some celestial bodies move that morning. So I ported the applet to Vala as a tribute to the Thin White Duke. Read on to see the results...

Continue reading

Vala is an Open Source Object Oriented Programming language similar to Java and C# that is both powerful and fun to use. Based on the GObject type system, it gives you full access to an entire Open Source ecosystem, from GTK+ for GUIs to GStreamer for multimedia. One thing it presently lacks though is a good framework for Test Driven Development, essential for designing and delivering quality end user experiences. In the spirit of Open Source, I've decided to use some of my spare time to do something about that. Read on to find out what...

Continue reading

Dia is a free and open source diagram creation program that runs on the main dekstop platforms. It's getting a bit long in the tooth, but its still a great tool and it's very easy to extend with plugins written in Python. The only catch is that you have to restart Dia everytime you change your code and there's no way to do unit tests. Until now that is. Read on to find out more about how to write and test your Dia plugins without leaving your favourite IDE.

Continue reading

Gherkin is a markup language used extensively in Behavior Driven Development (BDD) for writing tests. Porting it to Vala was one of the first steps in building a comprehensive testing framework for the language, an ongoing process that will be featured in a series of upcomming posts. In the meantime, read on to find out what it's used for and how you can get your hands on it...

Continue reading

A new year, a new desktop, a new blog. Not necessarily in that order. I've been using Linux on the desktop for over 15 years and for a lot of that time, my desktop was Gnome, either by choice or by default. When Ubuntu switched to Unity, so did I, and I hadn't really looked back until recently. I was surprised when I did...

Continue reading