In another life, I write line-of-business apps for people with far more money than sense with a group of cool people. One of the things this has taught me is the importance of writing something.

Case study: many moons ago, we started migrating all the builds of various Java components from Ant to Maven. One of the things Maven does for us is package up a little bit of metadata in each “artifact” (JAR file, web application, EAR, what have you) identifying what version it is, when it was built, whether it’s a debug build, and so on.

Of course, the first thing the technical management decided they wanted was to be able to query the components, in place, to verify that when we deploy version 4.20 of the frobnitzer module we actually get 4.20 loaded in the application, not a lingering version of 4.19 or someone’s development build. There were discussions and threads on the main mailing list and all sorts of “what is the best way to do this” and “should we use the Maven object model” and general bureaucratic foot-dragging on the whole thing; the people involved not only wanted to be able to query the system for its metadada, but wanted it written exactly right the first time.

Meanwhile, my pet corner of the universe had a similar, but much more contained, problem: the version number in the corner of one of the apps had to be adjusted by hand every build, and, as tedious and pointless tasks tend to do, it had been ignored for a while. So I wrote about 100 lines of code to pull out the Maven metadata and splat the version number from that into the corner of the screen, and called it a day.

That code is still the only actual code that anyone’s written to work with Maven metadata. Other projects are using it now, because it works, and it exists right now.

The Extreme Programming propellerheads in the audience are probably nodding along right about now and muttering something about “spike solutions”.