Category: Software Development

As it was a nice London day today – wind, rain, sunny spells and a cosy 15?C all that, I spent the day with my Mac learning how to get more out of Quicksilver. I was wondering for some time how to implement my own actions. The task at hand was to have a single…

Recently (well some time ago, but I am thinking at a leisurely pace) Jay discussed how he thinks, that DRY is not neccessarily the most important thing, when it comes to writing tests. As I a am working on a huge (by agile standards) project for a while now, I feel very dogmatic about DRY,…

These days virtualisation seems to be all the rage. There are some benefits to it. It’s a way to increase the utilsation of your hardware just as pipelining increases the utilisation of the processor’s execution units. But as pipelining it comes at a price. You might increase the throughput, but the latency gets higher. Furthermore…

Steve rightfully asked for the source of the bad feelings we had about about adding a sequential return value feature to Mockito. The issue is that a Mockito stub is stateless, i.e. the value returned depended solely on the parameters being passed in when calling the stub. Statelessness is generally a nice property. It makes…

Szczepan was kind enough to spent some time with me tonight chatting about his puzzles on whether to include a feature into Mockito that allows a stubbed method to return differently on different calls. Clearly jmock and easymock allow you to chain return values and even pass in callbacks, that the mock evaluates to answer…

Beeing budget-driven you have to have the right tools. The simplest thing I could come up with are the code scales, that tell you what you have got in your workspace: (svn diff |grep -e “^\+[^\+]”|wc -l;svn diff|grep -e “^-[^-]”|wc -l;echo “-“;echo “p”)|dc It once again proves the point that real programmers use unix and…

Now we got continuous integration, pair programming, TDD and many more things and still manage to pile up heaps of problems. So today Szczepiq and I were wondering, what to do about this. Of course we need a new acronym and we are cold-heartedly stealing one BDD (Sorry!) . Trouble is people always come up…

I choose this somewhat dry title for a presentation I did at TW UK the the other week. It was about an external DSL, I wrote some time back, that allows you to specify traversals of object graphs. These specifications might be used to perform the following operations with object graphs: Serialization Visualization Comparison Cloning…

Is the title of a pamphlet written by the late Edsger Dijkstra back in 1975. Working in “enterprise development”, I find that most of the stuff is still true. Replace PL/1 and Cobol with J2EE and ABAP or some other “crap du jour” and it will sound still very familiar. One point I like a…

The naming of this method is rather poor. I allways spend ages figuring out what it does. To sort it out once and for all I will put the translation into human language here: isAssignableFrom < => isSuperTypeOf