making the software-world a better place one document at a time
We are still in a situation where working from home is the normal situation. And while maybe you already got enough webcams to solve your conferencing problems, here are two new ideas.
A HDMI capture...
As promised, I gave some of the tutorials from my last post a try. Here is what I learned so far.
For android based devices, it seems that IP-Webcam is quite a good choice....
Before Corona, I was quite happy with my build-in webcam together with an additional external logitec C920HD. The logitec mainly replaced my build-in cam for my company notebook - it has a far better quality.
But now, that I am...
Some time ago, I attended a talk by Bernd Rücker. I can’t remember the talk anymore (probably something about workflows and decisions), but I remember that he set up a camera and self-recorded his talk. After the talk, he used...
Windows 10 together with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is now a great OS for development. You can easily switch between the powershell and bash and thus test your code on both systems.
What I love in powershell is...
Hacktoberfest turned October into the most productive month of the last year in regards to docToolchain:
Not only did we reach my goal of 10 pull requests for docToolchain,...
In order to optimize docToolchain for Mac and Linux, I wanted to give Sparx Enterprise Architect a try on a *nix environment.
I once already tried to install EA on Wine on Ubuntu within Hypervisor on Windows 10, but with...
While writing a tutorial, I just came across the need to target two different user groups - windows and linux users. I wanted to write some shell commands as example but didn’t know if I should use powershell examples or...
When you write integration tests for your web application, you certainly need an http client. But there are many on the market - too many and all with different approaches.
I recently learned to love HttpBuilder-NG. I already was...
When you work with several output formats for your doucments, it can be quite hard to get the size of oyur images right. Most of the time, you will use large images which should be scaled to 100% in regards...
Did you ever whished to change the color of your gradle log output? Maybe to highlight something?
AFAIK, Gradle has no support for colors out of the box, but you can solve this easily - even without an additional library.
...As architect, you are often reminded that you should model your architecture and not just draw diagrams. But have you ever seen a real architecture model?
I’ve only seen some aspects modeled, not the whole architecture. I use Sparx Enterprise...
Architekturdokumentation besteht hauptsächlich aus Fließtext, Tabellen und Diagrammen. Fließtext und Tabellen sollten nach der letzten Folge kein Problem mehr sein. Jetzt zeigen wir Ihnen mehrere Optionen, Diagramme in Ihre Dokumentation zu integrieren: Einerseits den...
In den letzten Ausgaben haben wir gezeigt, wie Sie AsciiDoc-Dokumente modular aufbauen und in verschiedene Zielformate wie PDF, DOCX oder Confluence konvertieren können. Diesmal gehen wir auf ein paar der Features von AsciiDoc ein,...
Some thing you just have to experience yourself before you realize it. One of those things is the power of open source.
I am just now sitting over a new project where...
The year is already seven days old, but it is still time to take a quick look back.
2017 was a great year for me regarding my community activity and the progress...
In der letzten Folge dieser Kolumne haben wir gezeigt, wie Sie Ihre AsciiDoc-Dokumente modular aufbauen können. In der dritten Folge der Kolumne erklären wir am Beispiel der Formate PDF, DOCX, Confluence und EPUB, wie...
In der letzten Ausgabe haben wir gezeigt, wie Sie mithilfe von AsciiDoc schnell zu ordentlich gestalteten Dokumenten kommen können. In der zweiten Folge unserer Kolumne möchten wir Ihnen Strukturierung und Modularisierung von Dokumentation vorstellen,...
Two days ago, a plantUML tweet caught my attention:
...I'll pay US$15 for someone who can do this @PlantUML or @Graphviz diagram for https://t.co/qiHlqMk9Kv:https://t.co/ImtOojup3d#opensource
— William Narmontas (@ScalaWilliam) 28. Oktober 2017
Dokumentation gehört zu den großen Übeln der Softwarezunft. Denn Software zu dokumentieren ist oft mühselig, zeitraubend und schlicht und ergreifend langweilig. Dass dem nicht so seien muss, zeigen die beiden Autoren Gernot Starke und...
As an architect, you often have to present your ideas and architecture to an audience. Powerpoint might seem to be a perfect fit for that, but people also want to have something they can mail around and read it without...
Last blog post showed you how to convert your asciidoc into .docx via docbook.
Pandoc can do more than that. It has a lot of target format under the hood.
The one I like most is ePub, since...
docToolchain is currently able to render your documents as HTML and PDF. But sometimes you just need a different format. The best solution I’ve found so far is pandoc - the universal document converter. It is a command line...
The last few days I had to learn the hard way that plantUML (as part of asciidoctor-diagram) is not a frient of asciidoctor-pdf.
I always thought that having plantUML for HTML rendering up and running with asciidoctor also means that...
Last time I wrote about how to configure Gradle to run behind a proxy with a local binary repository.
First, I have to say that I love twitter, because not long after I tweeted about the new blog post,
The open internet is a great place to code, but sometimes you are sitting behind a great firewall in a corporate environment. Your are not allowed to just pull the hottest stuff from the internet, but have to go through...
Every developer knows this problem - you work on a project and over time new versions of the configured dependencies are released. Sometimes it is even not that there is a new version, but it is the stable release you’ve...
Now that docToolchain handles your docs like your code, the next logical step is to add some automated tests.
That’s where htmlSanityCheck, a project originally started by Gernot Starke fits:
It is a gradle plugin which does some...
Sparx Enterprise Architect really shines when you use it to model your architecture by creating connections between elements. If you model your requirements, too, EA let’s you trace your design from the requirement up to the class.
Problem is, when...
Asciidoctor renders good looking HTML pages, but often you don’t have a server to publish the document for others to read. That’s why I render my documents as PDF or publish them to confluence. A single file can easily be...
Last week, I had the chance to attend a three day training on how to systematically improve software systems. It is called “IMPROVE” and is given by Dr. Peter Hruschka and Dr. Gernot Starke. The german description can...
If you describe a solution architecture, your document will be in an unfinished state for a long time. If you are on an agile project, your document will be a living one. There will be always open questions which need...
Today I will show how to add a change log to your documents. Git is quite good when it comes to log changes, so why not use git to add a table of changes to your document? If your version...
Up until now, the docToolchain build only generates HTML5 output. It looks nice, but sometimes you need different formats. For instance, when you want to share your architecture via mail, a single file format like PDF would be helpful -...
With the second blog post of this series, I already mentioned that I love AsciiDoc to create technical documentation, but I didn’t say too much about how to use AsciiDoc.
There is a simple reason for this - other...
Let’s recap what we did so far: in order to kickstart a documentation project, we’ve created a dual gradle / maven asciidoc build with included arc42 template in two languages and easy textual diagram drawing with planUML. That’s already quite...
Through the last blog posts, the build script advanced from a simple asciidoc example to a dual build asciidoc archetype with plantUML.
But when you want to document your project, you also need content. Wouldn’t it be great to have...
Let’s add PlantUML to our maven build. I’ll use a slightly different approach. For the gradle build, I referenced the asciidoctor-diagram ruby gem to be used. But there is also a .jar version of it which can be used....
Graphviz is cool to render diagrams and PlantUML depends on Graphviz. But Graphviz is also a command line tool which needs to be installed. You can run it as portable app, but what if your company does not...
So I told you to use AsciiDoc to write technical documents because of all the great features.
Today I want to show you how to unleash the power and get started.
Let’s first start with Gradle. I...
Last time I wrote about why I don’t like Word, but I didn’t mention an alternative.
For me, AsciiDoc as markup format is a perfect alternative for technical documents. Together with the tooling provided by the AsciiDoctorJ community it...
Don’t get me wrong – MS Word is a great product for many use cases, but most of them are IMHO outdated (like writing a letter) and writing modern documentation is not a use case where MS Word shines.
Today...
There still seem to be some Java-Developers who are afraid of mixing their Java codebase with the power of Groovy.
Some time ago, it was a valid argument that the dependency to the groovy-all.jar would blow up the generated application,...
From time to time I stumble upon a web application which lets you write notebooks like the ones you know from Mathematica. They let you mix formatted text which explains your code with code snippets. The output of those snippets...
Bad news first: I guess I do not belong to the target group of the Wacom Bamboo Spark :-)
My week began with a Mail from Amazon telling me that there they have a special offer for one of...
When working in a web environment, you often have to transfer arbitrary data like lists or maps as String of the network.
The followin Gist shows how to solve this by serializing a list or map as JSON or YAML....
Zwei Tage Javaland liegen gerade hinter mir. Zusammen mit Tobias Kraft hatte ich die tolle Gelegenheit unseren Vortrag über Spock und Geb nochmal vor einem größeren Publikum vorzutragen.
Die zwei Tage waren natürlich vollgepackt mit Vorträgen, gutem Essen und...
A Grails project can quickly grow into larger applications. In order to still keep an overview, some architecture documentation is quite useful. One of the most useful diagrams to dive into an application is the domain class diagrams which shows...
In two previous posts (Grails3.0 & Grails2.2) I described how to use Spock-Reports with Grails 3.0 and Grails 2.2.
Now, if you try to use it with Grails 2.5, it seems not to work from the...
In a previous post I described how to use Spock-Reports with Grails 3.0.
That was easy since Grails 3.0 is Gradle based.
Now I will try to figure out how to use Spock-Reports with Grails 2.2.4 .
...…but sometimes the tool makes a difference!
I just came back from an interesting 3 day workshop on which I had a first chance to make use of my drawing equipment I bought recently. Originally, I wanted to draw some...
Spock-Reports is a great way to create better reports for Spock.
Since Grails 3.0 is based on Gradle, integrating the Spock-Reports is easy. Just open your build.gradle file and...
Auf dem Entwicklertag Karlsruhe hatte ich zusammen mit Tobias Kraft mal wieder die Möglichkeit meine Ideen in einem Vortrag zu präsentieren. Mittlerweile ist sogar das Video zum Vortrag online.
In dem Vortrag geht es darum, wie man bei der...
The new template engine for the Spock-Reports-Plugin is out. Let’s build an asciidoc template with it.
Renato describes this step in detail on the Plugin Homepage. I’ve placed the properties file in
Since I experienced some problems when I tried to use the Spock-Reports-Plugin in Grails, I now tried to use it with Gradle.
The basics are easy and well described on the Spock-Reports page - just add the needed repository...
Just started my new blog. I’ve already had several blogs with more or less success, so why do I now start another? First of all because I don’t what to be a ghost developer.
This is just a test on how I could redirect old blog posts It seems that I need to have 40 words of abstracts in order to avoid a redirect from the overview page.
Oh, how much are 40 words?...