The problem with it is that it is an open source project

I was watching a very interesting presentation both in terms of content and format, Google Test Automation Conference Lightning Talks, when a fragment of a speaker just hit me:

The problem with X (n.b. an oss project name) is that it is an open source project, everybody can contribute to it and, because of that, the quality is not very high.

Wow! Firstly, I am wondering how the other speakers felt about it - as most of them were coming from open source projects. Even more, I am wondering what is his employer thinking about this.
But let's try to put it straight here. Collective code ownership has proved his merits during the last years. Also, I am quite sure that even in the company he works for, there are many people working sometimes on the same pieces of code just to make it better (probably the single case in which this would not be valid would be if the guy is self employed and always works by his own). Being in the software development industry, I would have expected this guy to already know the saying "four eyes can see more than two can", so I am wondering what exactly he meant by the above phrase.
In my opinion the problem with open source projects is that (don't worry I will not repeat the above statement) there are people out their speaking on no basis. There are people that even if using those projects (sometimes benefiting from their usage), they just keep complaining and doing absolutely nothing. This is the problem with open source projects.
Other than this, watch the video: there are quite a few really interesting parts in it (except this guy's one which is completely unrelated to the talk subject).

Groovy support for JMeter

After watching the excellent presentation on performance testing given by Goranka Bjedov (QA Engineer at Google), my interest on JMeter increased exponentially. Planning for some testing of InfoQ upcoming features (oh yes, we have some surprises on our bag for this beginning of the year) I have giving it a try.
It took me a while to identify the elements involved while creating a scenario (by the way: JMeter name for scenarios: Test plan is not quite correct) and the components to be used, but the online documentation is not so bad.
However, while playing around I have felt the need to create some monitoring scripts (n.b. I am still working on this part). JMeter offers support for BSF and BSH out of the box, but having in mind the release of Groovy 1.0 I thought to try to add Groovy support to JMeter.
So, last night, armed with the Groovy intro chapter from The Definitive Guide to Grails and Groovy in Action [note], I have started my attempt. The task wasn't easy, but not because of some obvious reasons: different parts of JMeter are using different approaches (like being contributed by completely unrelated people that never looked at the existing code), so deciding how should I write it took me a while. However, in a couple of hours I am having an working version: 2 main classes that are reused for different UI parts and respectively for Groovy integration, an interface to allow extensions and a couple of almost empty classes for each component : PreProcessor, PostProcessor, Listener and Sampler. Total size: 12 classes, aprox. 300 usefull LOC, cca. 500 TLOC. The UI is not so nice but follows the existing JMeter UI (I haven't done any GUI work in the last couple of years so I am a bit rusty [smile/]). After doing this job, I think most pieces are pretty reusable so integrating other scripting solution like JRuby or even the JDK6 scripting support would be a very easy task.
I am thinking to contribute this code to either JMeter or a Groovy module, but I still need to decide. Meanwhile, let me know if you are interested in this integration.

PS: I am still wondering how can I get my hands on any of the Manning books. I have pinged them a couple of times, submitted a complaint but never heard back from them.

Update: thanks to Dierk Koenig (author of Groovy in Action) and Olivia (from Manning) the above problem seems to start having a solution. Thanks.

Why I still love Maven

Being it maven or maven2 I continue to love it:

[INFO] Using default encoding to copy filtered resources.
Downloading: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/maven/maven-plugins/4/maven-plugins-4.pom
[WARNING] Unable to get resource from repository central (http://repo1.maven.org/maven2)
Downloading: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/maven/maven-plugins/4/maven-plugins-4.jar
[WARNING] Unable to get resource from repository central (http://repo1.maven.org/maven2)
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Failed to resolve artifact.

Missing:
----------
1) org.apache.maven:maven-plugins:jar:4

  Try downloading the file manually from the project website.

  Then, install it using the command:
      mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=org.apache.maven -DartifactId=maven-plugins \
          -Dversion=4 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=/path/to/file

  Path to dependency:
        1) org.apache.maven:maven-surefire-plugin:maven-plugin:2.3-SNAPSHOT
        2) org.apache.maven:maven-plugins:jar:4

----------
1 required artifact is missing.

for artifact:
  org.apache.maven:maven-surefire-plugin:maven-plugin:2.3-SNAPSHOT

from the specified remote repositories:
  apache.snapshots (http://people.apache.org/repo/m2-snapshot-repository),
  central (http://repo1.maven.org/maven2)

Isn't it sweet?