Labora » Agile

Recruiting in Colombo

marvi — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 11:00:57 +0000

The company in Sri Lanka where I work are in the process of recruiting new developers. They used our flow/wizard/form builder (the old and boring version) to build a wizard to gather information about the applicants. Click on “apply online”.

If you are a Java or web developer, living in Sri Lanka, you should really consider working for Mazarin.

Scripting in Java EE

marvi — Thu, 18 May 2006 14:43:18 +0000

Three guys from Oracle. Two french guys that was sometimes hard to understand.
They started with a introduction to Groovy. Really cool things. I need to look into that in greater detail. There is two books coming out soon, one is “Groovy in Action” from Manning.

They demoed a small Groovy Swing application using JMX to deploy an EAR to Oracle App server and create a DataSource for it.

Then they showed WSDL stubs in Javascript
Automatically generates Javascript to consume a web service, from a WSDL. Then a web client can call Javascript methods to consume the service in the client.

Check out!

JSR 223: one API that scripting languages can implement. Then they can be used from ScriptEngine Interface. It supports binding variables from Java to the script. Share data.

Demo: a Javascript running inside Java 6 that talks to a web service. Then you can talk to this script from a jabber client.

JUnit 4 and Java EE 5 - Better Testing by Design

marvi — Thu, 18 May 2006 14:42:46 +0000

This is the first time I will hear Kent Beck speak. I have read a few of his books and he seems like a smart guy. This session is also crowded. I seem to pick the popular ones today. But it pays off, since they all have been splendid.

The speaker is making a joke about developers that LIKE testing.

“Testing is getting respect from developers. Five years a go this room would have had five people in it.”

The testing momentum is growing, but TDD is not yet mainstream. What will happen? Will TDD be a blipp in the CS history, like “Britney Spears”. Or will it continue to grow?

“JUnit isn’t complicated, anyone could have written it. But I did, and that’s why I stand here and you all sit there.”

JUnit 4 has some big changes, but remains backwards compatible. They have removed the composite pattern (Test interface implemented both by TestCase and TestSuite). No more testFoo in test names. Instead use the @Test annotaion. No more setUp() and tearDown(). Use annotations @before and @after.

Beck is telling the storing about the flight from Zurich to the US together with Erich Gamma. beck was doing mostly Smalltalk (still doing “Latin”, said Gamma). gamma was into Java. So during the flight Beck suggested that they should do some Java hacking. That was the beginning of JUnit. Never intended to be distributed.

Some good stuff:

“If the test is hard to write you might actually have a architectural problem in the code”

“Something in my programming style leads me to never need mock object.”

New blog

marvi — Fri, 05 May 2006 15:19:29 +0000

Since Charlotte is also using my other blog there has been less and less posts about programming.

I thought that I might as well start a new blog to cover more work related stuff and also some nerdy things that friends and family seldom have the courtesy appreciate.

I will go to Javaone next week and that usually gives a lot of things to blog about.