I don’t know exactly why I stopped blogging here. But I am not dead! Those interested in Java or Performance topics for sure read my posts on blog.codecentric.de, where I write at least a post per month, or my random tweets @CodingFabian.

I guess I can blame it on work, cause I travel more than I used to, helping clients in Europe cope with their performance issues. But I also speak at conferences like JAX.

With my wife, I have been in the states last month, and now our next big project starts. Building a house Lets see if I afterwards can confirm the similarities between building software and building a house.

However, I will not write much about the progress as others do. Its progressing nicely, and my ranting about stupid processes will be kept internally

Lets see if after the house is up and running, I will have more time to do medieval stuff again!

And I think the answer is exactly the same in both: It depends. Many combination’s can be successful. Even some exotic teams can make the impossible. It also depends on personal skill and dedication to the course.
But yes there are general recommendations. In an MMORPG you often need somebody…

1. … keeping all the bad guys away. Taking the beating (the tank).
2. … caring for you, healing your wounds. Saving your life (the healer).
3. … attacking the troublemakers. Earning the glory (the damage dealer).
4. … helping all the others to do their role better. Unsung heroes (the supporter).

For SCRUM Teams this is pretty much the same. You need various skills. Programming skills solving the issues and testing skills making sure you don’t blow up. Caching skills to help the team perform better, and documentation skills to make sure the project isn’t hit and run.

Side note: Somebody was missing form above. The Quest handing NPC. Which would be of course the Product Owner

For me the SCRUM Master would be the Tank, holding all the trouble away from the team. Frankly, this was not completely my idea, as Charls Miller from Atlassian blogged about holding Aggro before.

You do not need an ideal team. You need a team to get work done.

Free People of Middle Earth mustering (100+ Players, not all on screen)

Orc hordes charging (number unknown, but said to be more than 150), including two trolls

Some more or less intense fighting going on (not everybodys PC could handle the load)

Awesome, eh? Perhaps we meet in middle earth?

bayarsaikhan took a great picture of the core team on stage:

From Left to right:

• Bernhard Schussek, who works on Lime2 and Forms2
• Stefan Koopmanschap, who is our Community Relations Manager (the one who buys beer)
• Me, currently busy with Ticket Management and fixing the 1.x branch
• Fabien Potencier, symfony Masterbrain
• Jonathan Wage, our ORM expert developing Doctrine 2
• Dustin Whittle, working for Yahoo and keeping an eye out on the big Web/Enterprise world for symfony
• Kris Wallsmith, very busy with being Release Manager for our currently supported 1.3 and 1.4 release

PdfPCell pdfPCell = table.getRow(0).getCells()[0];
List compositeElements = pdfPCell.getCompositeElements();
Paragraph p = (Paragraph) compositeElements.get(0);
Chunk c = (Chunk) p.get(0);
Jpeg jpeg = (Jpeg) (((Object[])c.getAttributes().get("IMAGE"))[0]);

Now comes my excuse for this crap. I need to parse this HTML and render it in a PDF (currently using iText):

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td width="1%"><img height="100" border="0" width="150" src="/pat_to.jpg" /></td>
<td>some fancy text</td>
</tr>
</table>

iText cannot automatically resize columns. So the column needs an explicit width. I don’t know the width of the table, because its not on the page, so I need the page width. I need to delve into the cell of the table which I know to contain the image. I need to know that its an Jpeg and that it had no alignment because if it had it would not be wrapped as chunk in a paragraph.
This is among the ugliest I ever wrote. But now my excuse. It is not my faul

The iText API (in 2.7.1) is not consistent at all, you have Arrays, Lists, Maps mixed and matched, keys as String, Constant (public or private constant) or no keys at all. Properties of images stored for each type in a different way. And you need to know a lot on yout parsed html structure, because iText cannot discover it. The way the HTML parser is implemented is way to basic and not extendable.

Currently thinking about switching to POI or rewriting the iTextParser….

• about 140 Ticktes have been closed
• Doctrine 1.2, 1.1.6 and 1.0.14 have been released
• symfony 1.2.10, 1.3.0 and 1.4.0 have been released
• A new symfony advent calendar was unveiled. Its a book that has been translated to 5 languages

We all hope you enjoy our stuff hand have productive days till Christmas.