JavaZone 2009

Nearly one week since this years JavaZone conference with around 2000 attending. Time for some reflection: The agenda was published fashionably late and with 6 parallel sessions, picking the right talk seemed like a challenge.

Behaviour Driven Development with Mockito

I’ve been using EasyMock for 3 years now, and have been quite happy with the way it has helped me to test drive development. Sometimes though, I’ve felt that my tests have become hard to read. Hard to read tests is often a test smell and a sign that the code is poorly factored so I should be careful blaming this all on EasyMock. Seriously, EasyMock has been a good friend and I wasn’t really looking for a replacement. But then I stumbled across the Mockito mocking framework

Disabling tests in Maven

Sometimes you want to disable tests in Maven, f.ex integration tests that you need to just do quick tests against an external component. These are brittle tests and should therefore not be part of the automatic build …..

Help! My development environment is killing my productivity

No question about it, as software developers our single most important task is to delive business value for our customers. The software industry is turning their back to the classic waterfall style of development and embracing agile methodologies. Still, teams struggle to deliver functional value at a regulart steady pace. There might be several reasons why this happens. In this post I like to focus on one important factor in the process of software development, the development environment.

Workaround for mvn release:prepare scm tag bug

I’ve had some problems releasing my components using the mvn release:prepare plugin for some time now. Since this used to work before I was convinced that this was project specific and caused by some dependency or plugin conflict. However this was not the case. It turns out that this is a problem with maven 2 and subversion.

Spring WS and basic authentication

Today I had to integrate against a web service that required basic authentication in order to use the service. One of my colleagues had started out writing a Spring WebService client against the service. Midway through the task, I was asked to finish off the task as he had to prioritize some urgent production issues. After some initial set up trouble I was ready to test the service….

AspectJ – Lessons learned

AspectJ is a powerfull tool and is able to solve some problems that the Java language is not able to. It gives developers flexibility to solve crosscutting concerns like logging, profiling, security and so on. At the same time, AOP can be dangerous to us and may lead to serious problems if used incorrectly.

Over the last 2 years I’ve been using aspects quite a lot and gained some experience on how to use it. In this post I want to share some of the lessons I’ve learned.

Colorado software summit 2008

Yesterday, 3 colleagues and I, arrived in Keystone Colorado to attend the 2008 Colorado Software Summit. Having spent the entire day (and more) traveling we were very satisfied when we finally could get some sleep. Today is Saturday and since the conference doesn’t start until tomorrow, we have the entire day off to do anything we want. 

This is my first time at this conference and I really look forward to it. The agenda looks really promising with loads of interesting talks. The program can be found here, and hopefully I will have time to comment on some of the talks later in the week..

Spring WS and static wsdls

I’ve been using Spring WS for a while now and come to learn that the dynamic wsdl generarion is functioning quite well. A couple of days ago I was however forced to explore the static wsdl part of the framework as we needed to make a component backward compatible with an earlier version written using Tibco. Luckily, I found what I needed in the Spring WS reference guide
(http://static.springframework.org/spring-ws/sites/1.5/reference/html/server.html)…

Agile cooking

A couple of weeks ago I arranged an “Agile cooking” session for my colleagues in my home in Lorenskog, just outside Oslo. The plan was to have focus on agile methods and combine it with cooking and social gathering. My colleagues are very open-minded and the meetup was very good indeed, 10 out of 12 showed up. Planning was started a few weeks before the session, on our company wiki, were we discussed which food to cook, agile techniques. Since we were all going to cook, we decided to make tapas and so, a tapas backlog was created on the wiki…..