cwash into software

Preface

This work came out of an lack of consistent, cohesive documentation for beginners on transactions. Similar material does exist, but much of it suffers from either being hard to find, scattered and spotty, or not written at a basic enough level where prerequisite knowledge is not required in order to understand the material covered. Over the course of this series of articles, we’ll talk about what concepts you need to know in order to effectively and correctly make use of transactions in your applications. This series of articles is written as a set of core concepts to understanding the basics of transactions, and is intended for junior to intermediate level developers, but my hope is that others will benefit from this series as well. As always, feedback is greatly appreciated.

What is a transaction?

Etymology

The word transaction comes from the Latin word transactionem meaning “an agreement, accomplishment,” which itself comes from the past participle of the verb transigere, transactus, meaning “drove or carried through.”

Transactions defined

The word’s definition is typically related to business or economics, meaning a single business deal, or an exchange of goods between two parties. Most introductions to transactions use an example of debiting one bank account and crediting another. When we remove funds from one account, we need to make sure that they are deposited into the other. If something fails (sufficient funds do not exist in the account being debited, or the account being credited has been closed) then both accounts need to be returned to their original state before the exchange began. This is actually a very good example, but how does that apply to software?

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In a recent tech talk, I watched Miško Hevery propose an interesting challenge to his audience: start a toy project and try to write the code with no if-else or switch blocks at all. None at all?  Before thinking about how to do this, why would you want to do it in the first place?  On the surface, it may seem to the unassuming a bit counter-intuitive.  Comparison-based branching is at the heart of programming, and the concept of an if-else or switch block is almost universal, existing in most every programming language ever devised.  What’s Hevery’s agenda with this exercise – and what can possibly be gained from trying to write a program without branching entirely?

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Back in April, there was an interesting article quoting Ron Jeffries et al on InfoQ looking at code reuse from an agile perspective. The conversation steered toward explaining reuse as a concern that is very expensive, looking at it from a top-down, “enterprise”-wide lens.

But is code reuse a black and white issue? My contention is there are varying degrees of reuse that are often neglected on a microscale within an even moderately-sized project. If the code you produce isn’t going to be reused, is it even going to be looked at? These are similar problems with similar solutions. (continue reading…)

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…)

Update: Sysinternals puts out some great developer friendly tools. They come in handy!
Update #2: I’ve made the switch to using Launchy over DOMercury.

Working on Windows XP is unavoidable at my job. While it’s not my favorite environment, I’ve found a decent baseline of software tools to augment the barebones OS that can get me to a place where it isn’t that bad. Note, I’m not including any tools for doing off-development related things, anything development related that is on the web or any cool plugins for any of these programs.

Here is what I need, in roughly the order I download them: (continue reading…)