Monthly Archives: October 2013

The maintainability legend

I came across a couple of articles today talking about software maintainability. This one, from Greg Jorgensen, is fun to read. Greg is specialized in dealing with unmaintainable legacy software, and he lists  everything developers should do to keep him in business. This other one, from Matt DuVall, is about the myth of maintainability and talks about all these design errors made in the name of maintainability.

I couldn’t agree more with these two articles. Developers spend way too much time Continue reading

How to configure SearchBlox to index a “form authenticated” web site ?

You’re working in a company which has many sources of information. There’s this wiki maintained by the support team, and the sharepoint intranet used by the marketing team. There’s also this shared folder where anyone drops Word, excel, PDF files. The developers also have their JIRA bug tracker. Looking for a piece of information is a nightmare. You looked for a tool that would index all of this data and make it searchable from one single place, and eventually found SearchBlox. Built on top on the Apache Lucene search engine, SearchBlox offers a really nice and easy to use interface. There even is a free edition ! But soon you hit a problem : how do you index a website requiring authentication ?

SearchBlox

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