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 Standard Podcast [19:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Java Rant Episode 2 – January 29, 2008

Show Notes…

Welcome back to the Java Rant podcast

Code Testing

• Functional testing
• Integration testing
• Unit testing

Mock Objects

JUnit talk

Types of Unit Testing Methodologies

• White box tests
• Black box tests
• Test driven development

Test coverage tools & the false sense of security

Project Pea & Matt Harrah

Three challenges

Beginners – static members:

1. Write a class that counts the number of times an instance is created
2. You will need a main method that loops a certain number of times creating instances of your class
3. Each time an instance is created, print the number of times an instance has been created.

Intermediate – white box testing (download intermediate file)

1. Download the Java file from the show notes and write a JUnit test to make sure it works
2. Quick hint: It doesn’t work under all situations

Advanced – test driven development (download advanced file)

1. Download the interface from the show notes, it tells exactly what the implementation is supposed to do
2. Write tests that check to see if your implementation works
3. Write the implementation code until your tests all pass

Thanks

• Jordan Richley for the JavaRant artwork
• Feedburner.com for the feed redirects
• Theme Music
  • Opening -”Motherboard” composed by Andy Potterton, published by Perfect Solution Music
  • Closing - “Quick Escape” by Hot Like Cajun from www.hotlikecajun.com

• Contact
  • http://www.javarant.com
  • http://groups.google.com/group/javarant
  • Call with questions or feedback - 206-350-8705
  • or email comments@javarant.com

I have been hearing some buzz in different news sites about how slow Java is. There have also been a few people that I have run into in the past month that have been asking about it. Where is this coming from? I thought we put the “Java is so stinkin’ slow” argument to bed back in the late 90’s early 2000’s.
(Continue reading…)

I have been talking with quite a few people lately asking them what strategies they use for testing their applications. I was a bit surprised to find that most of them only do a little bit of functional testing by making sure that what they just wrote actually works. They don’t do testing to make sure that everything else still works.
(Continue reading…)

 

 Java Rant Episode 1 - January 10th 2008 [16:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Welcome to the launch of the Java Rant podcast

Why am I doing this podcast?

Quick talk about Google Web Toolkit

Three challenges

Beginners:

The answer should look like this

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
…
81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90
91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Intermediates:

The XML format for the answer will be

<challenge number=””1””>
<line>
<number>1</number>
<number>2</number>
…
<number>10</number>
</line>

You get the idea

Advanced:

I will be posting the answer on the Google groups page

Thanks

• Jordan Richley for the JavaRant artwork
• Feedburner.com for the feed redirects
• Theme Music
  • Opening -”Motherboard” composed by Andy Potterton, published by Perfect Solution Music
  • Closing - “Quick Escape” by Hot Like Cajun from www.hotlikecajun.com

• Contact
  • http://www.javarant.com
  • http://groups.google.com/group/javarant
  • Call with questions or feedback - 206-350-8705
  • or email comments@javarant.com

In an interview with the Java Posse guys, Martin Odersky had a great answer to the question, “Should Java get closures?” Paraphrased, his answer was that it is like giving an elephant wings, it sounds like a great idea but what is the purpose. After I finished laughing and got back on the road from the near collision, I realized that he had just put into words what I have been feeling for a while. It seems that there has been a lot of talk about the syntactic sugar that can be added to the language, but is that the answer?

I really would love to see closures added to Java (along with several other big changes), but not just as a smattering of sugar. If you are going to add features to a language make them first order citizens or don’t do it at all. There is quite a bit that we can glean from other languages such as Ruby and Groovy. They have done some things very well and we should learn from other people’s successes.

Let me change the original question around a bit, should the Java programming language get an overhaul or should it be left alone?

Every once in a while I stop to take a look at where technology has come from and where it is going. This time my musings took me back to the late 90’s and what it was like to hard wire all my HTML into Servlets, WOW what a great idea that was! Right? We look back and laugh now at what we did just as we will in ten years at what we do now.

Remember how JSPs were the greatest thing since sliced bread? Then a massive spike of activity came because everyone wanted to convert their system to use EJBs. Then arose the era of Struts! Life was a bed of roses; there was no way web development could get any better. Then a flurry of frameworks and standards arose to make our collective lives much easier: Spring, Hibernate, Java Server Faces, JMS, script.aculo.us, Rails, and the list could go on and on.

While thinking about all of the tools that I have used through the years to make the latest and greatest sites, I realized just how much work it is to keep up on the power curve of programming. (Continue reading…)

In today’s development environment, users expect to be able to visualize data, configuration, and even the processes of a system. For this reason, they use tools to communicate requirements visually with stakeholders and subject matter experts. Think for a moment about UML, it takes a very complex set of data and represents it visually to simplify the communication of software requirements and design. Likewise, there are potential visual tools for describing workflows, data mining, server management, and many other business processes. These tools are able to boost productivity and reduce cost, which is obviously a win-win situation.

Historically, writing these tools has been very time consuming and reserved for those GUI gurus that are well above mere mortals. However, that barrier has been broken down for us by the folks working on the Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF).

You may be wondering, “What is GMF and what can it do for me?” GMF is a framework that takes a set of configuration files (a domain model, a graphical definition, and a tool definition), puts them all in a blender, and **poof - magic** out comes a professional looking Eclipse plug-in. (Continue reading…)