cwash into software

Update: I cleaned up the example based on Rogerio’s comments.

Recently I stumbled onto JMockit and have been pretty impressed with the flexibility of the approach it takes.

Many mocking frameworks seem to take an elitist attitude toward testable code, not attempting to solve certain problems in favor of guiding one toward a more testable design. It appears JMockit is a response to this. (continue reading…)

As of JUnit 4.4, if you happen to peek into the distributed JAR you’ll notice something a little off: in addition to the org.junit.* packages there is this a funny-looking org.hamcrest.* package sticking out like a sore thumb. You may have seen other projects pick up a dependency on Hamcrest lately as well, and I bet you’re wondering what it is. Let’s get to the bottom of it. (continue reading…)

Update: A great article on OSGi popped up on Javalobby today. Check it out.

I haven’t yet written any thoughts about OSGi but it’s something that’s increasingly found its way on to my radar over the past year and a half or so. I’ve been doing a little bit of reading and research on it lately, (a quick introduction can be found via Adrian Colyer’s talks on InfoQ about it). Needless to say it’s got me excited. Really excited – to the point where I’m catching myself geeking out uncontrollably like Quagmire from Family Guy. What’s got me all giggity? (continue reading…)

I just read Your Unit Tests Lie to You by Janusz Gorycki and I was going to leave a comment there, but thought it was more appropriate to expand my comments off into their own thing.  For those that haven’t read the article, its basic premise is to grab hold of the nearest “test infected” reader and shake the warm and fuzzy out of them.  It paints the short sightedness of many recent “unit testing” converts as living in a dream world where unit tests should replace formal testing. It follows with many sentiments I’ve read (and written about here) for a while now.  It’s not that I disagree with what is being said in the article, or its tone for that matter; most of what is being said is spot on.  Unit testing is definitely not a silver bullet.  If you read my blog often, you no doubt get that. The article ends:

So please, don’t fire your QA department just yet. Their job is still important, even if you unit test.

So to Janusz, the fundamental problem here is a general ignorance of the purposes behind a unit test suite.  I agree 100% that’s the primary factor behind his problem.  What don’t we agree on?  Semantics.  But semantics are important!  How far do we have to go for a true zen-understanding of this issue?  Not far.  Indulge me — (continue reading…)

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately and have been meaning to plug some of my favorite reads, and one of the things that I’ve been trying to read with an eye toward is for converting those that have been stuck on “behind-the-curve” projects to the new way of thinking and doing things. As such, and just in time for the weekend, I’ve compiled a list of my favorites with an eye to the “movers and shakers” that have driven innovation in the Enterprise Java world recently. Note that even though some of these links are specific to certain frameworks/technologies, there is a common thread throughout most of these that have a bigger focus on the best way to solve problems using Java 5/EE 5 constructs and concepts.

A book that should be on any Java developer’s shelf is Effective Java (2nd Edition). Make sure you get the second edition, for all of the Java 5 changes. This talk by Joshua should whet your appetite. (His talk on good API design is also very good.) You should also take a look at Bob Lee’s talk on Guice. Guice’s philosophy and focus on typesafety has spilled over into Web Beans (and newer versions of Seam) and its annotation based approach has heavily influenced newer Spring features. I especially like his points on type safety around the 11-minute mark. The walkthrough at the end of the talk from “old way” to “new way” is great for people who haven’t really gotten away from Factories, Delegates, and Service Locators yet.

The Guice video mentions that a common thread in modern Java frameworks is a focus on testability. Testing is a very important concept that nearly all new frameworks have embraced, but you still need know-how to be successful with testing. I’ve come across some great books recently in the automated (developer) testing arena. I’ve found the most thorough book on the topic out there is Lasse Koskela’s Test Driven. The ideas and topics discussed in the book are really language independent, and work equally well with other languages. To cut your teeth on TestNG, which the Seam documentation turned me onto, I recommend the TestNG developers’ book Next Generation Java Testing: TestNG and Advanced Concepts. Cedric Beust, also the author of EJBGen, and Hani Suleiman, author of the Bile Blog, produced a book that was a suprisingly good read. It’s packed with a lot of knowledge and some interesting takes on EE concepts. Newer versions of JUnit also include many of these features and concepts, so you’ll get the underpinnings of these concepts in this book. This video gives you a basis to TestNG’s approach.

As one of the growing number of developers who have an application in the Seam In Production page, there are a few Seam resources I have to share. Even if you don’t get into Seam, it should be on your radar because a lot of the core concepts around conversations have evolved into Web Beans, and are found other frameworks like Apache Orchestra and Spring WebFlow. Pete Muir did a Webcast that’s a great introduction to Seam 2.

Author of one of my favorite Seam blogs, Jacob Orshalick, has created a DZone RefCard for Seam 2.1 Core. It’s right off the presses, being published this week, but is a great quick-capsule review of what Seam can do for you, and nice to have on your desk if you’re writing Seam. If you need more in-depth descriptions of what’s on the RefCard, Jacob also coauthored the latest edition of the great Seam reference Seam Framework: Experience the Evolution of Java EE.
Dan Allen’s Seam in Action is another excellent resource. Of course, the awesome Seam Docs and Forums always come in handy. You should also RSS in.relation.to – the Hibernate/Seam developers’ group blog.

I know I’m leaving some great things out. What resources do you think someone who is used to J2EE should take a look at to get them “up to speed” with the state of the art?

Trying to run through a screencast I’m putting together after upgrading to Leopard, I noticed Maven giving me a strange error when trying to run archetype:generate and realized that Leopard includes its own version of Maven (and Ant) out of the box.  The problem is that it’s version 2.0.6, which doesn’t have support for this feature.  I then set about trying to upgrade Maven (and in the process, Java) and here is what I uncovered. (continue reading…)

I couldn’t find any definitive answer to this question, so here’s what I found, just incase anyone else needs this little nugget of information: the runtime dependencies for an Axis2 client that uses Axis Data Binding (ADB):
activation.jar
axiom-api.jar
axiom-dom.jar
axiom-impl.jar
axis2-java2wsdl.jar
axis2-jaxws.jar
axis2-jaxws-api.jar
axis2-metadata.jar
axis2-saaj.jar
axis2-saaj-api.jar
backport-util-concurrent.jar
commons-codec.jar
commons-fileupload.jar
commons-httpclient.jar
neethi.jar
wsdl4j.jar
wstx-asl.jar
xml-resolver.jar
xmlbeans.jar

It’s long, I know – but not as long as what you find in $AXIS2_HOME/lib!