Architecture Rules welcomes Chris

[Mike Nereson]

I created Architecture Rules over a year ago now. Read on to learn why and how, or skip the next paragraph to get to the point:

I read a post on dzone about Jdepend. I wanted to further myself as a developer and start getting more interested in architecture, so I followed the prescription of the post. I pulled down Jdepend, coded up a new unit test and defined a rule. Package A can not depend on Package B. I ran the test and it passed. Cool. I wanted to see if fail so I coded a few more tests. With just three rules defined, the code became very difficult to scan. I could not gleen what rules I had defined. It was not easy to see what packages were not allowed to interact by scanning the code. It was hard to add new violations to existing rules. Within a couple of hours that night I whipped up an XML configuration and a factory to read the XML into rules that JDpend could understand and work with. I had satisfied my itch and proceeded to put that code away more than likely never to be used again. Then, I figured the code was written and it worked, and googlecode was pretty new, so I threw it up on google code. Over a year later, and after contributions from 4 or 5 individuals from around the world, Architecture Rules has a three distinct modules including a Maven 2 pluign, hundreds of downloads and maven hosted artifacts. Mykola, others, and I have worked hard and have put out a pretty good tool with great feedback and comments from many users.

Today, Chris Dempsey blogged about some techniques that project leaders should use to help attract new users to their project. I asked him to review this project to ensure that it met his criteria for an easy-to-use, easy-to-join , well-documented project. He graciously donated some time to review the site and the project and provided some much appreciated feedback. It appears as though after some careful review that Architecture Rules intrigued him and he happened to be looking for a project to join. He and I talked for a couple of hours tonight and I've decided that he would be a great addition to the small project team that we have here on this project. Between this coding experience and his blogging he will really be able to help the project grow - and hopeful he'll help us grow and we'll help him grow.

Chris's post is here. You can also learn a lot about his character, development experience, and his ambitions by reading his blog http://www.grok-programming.com/.

Chris is going to spend some time code spelunking and checking out the docs. He has a couple of ideas for the project that he'll bring up when he is ready. I think he also mentioned reviewing some issues in the issue list. So, welcome Chris. I hope we can all serve each other and this project well. With Mykola pretty well dedicated to the Maven plugin which is fantastic, I sure do appreciate the thought of having someone to help me build up the core of the project.

I should have a 3.0 update for you very soon.  Basically, I have added a Listener api and implemented a few listeners and am working adding support for arbitrary properties that the listeners and potential 3rd party extensions can use. All of the other issues listed in the 3.0 road map have been resolved. I also introduced a default-architecture-rules.xml which will be read before any other configuration so that we can express default values in XML rather than code and constants.

That's all I've got. Thanks for joining us Chris , and thank you Mykola for your commitment over the past year and helping to get Architecture Rules to the point that we are at today.

~ Mike Nereson

[cdempsey]

Thanks for the invite Mike! I hope I can get up to speed soon so I
can contribute in a meaninful way.

Hi Mykola! :)

[Mykola Nikishov]

cdempsey <cda...@gmail.com> writes:

Hi Chris and welcome abroad ;-)

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MAN-UANIC

[Mykola Nikishov]

Mykola Nikishov <mykola.n...@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Chris and welcome abroad ;-)

Oooops, s/abroad/onboard/g

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MAN-UANIC