Swing/Groovy Integration Expert
Andres Almiray is a Sun Certified Programmer, Sun Certified Web Component Developer with more than 8 years of experience in software design and development, currently working for Oracle as a Principal Software Engineer. He has been involved in web and desktop application development since the early days of Java. He has also been teacher of computer science courses in the most prestigious education institute in Mexico. His current interests include software architecture, developer testing, Groovy, Spring and swing hacks. He is a true believer in open source and has participated in popular projects like Groovy, JMatter and DbUnit, as well as starting his own projects (Json-lib and EZMorph among others). Andres maintains a blog at http://jroller.com/aalmirayAndres Almiray's Weblog
Java, Spring, Groovy, testing and what not
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
I haven't found time to properly blog but thanks to Twitter I can send mini-updates (http://twitter.com/aalmiray). You can track all JavaOne news with #javaone, Groovy news with #groovy. I also posted some photos from Tuesday and 2GX (better late than never 
) There have been some impressive demos, I'm sure the links have been already posted elsewhere, as expected you can find JavaFX related stuff everywhere.
) There have been some impressive demos, I'm sure the links have been already posted elsewhere, as expected you can find JavaFX related stuff everywhere.
Monday, May 5, 2008
The dbUnit development team has just sent the announcement, version 2.2.2 is out! 
I mentioned a couple of days ago that the snapshot version was ready. Hopefully this release will make it into Maven's central repo pretty soon so that the easyb guys may update their plugin to this release (they are still using 2.1), the Grails dbUnit plugin will surely benefit from this release too.
Here is the list of fixed bugs
I mentioned a couple of days ago that the snapshot version was ready. Hopefully this release will make it into Maven's central repo pretty soon so that the easyb guys may update their plugin to this release (they are still using 2.1), the Grails dbUnit plugin will surely benefit from this release too.Here is the list of fixed bugs
- End of table name cut off when bracketed in FlatDtdProducer Issue: 1953115. Thanks to Mike Norrish.
- IncompatibleClassChangeError with 2.2.1 Issue: 1926302.
- junit jar-file should be JDK 1.4 compatible Issue: 1955929.
- Version 2.2-dev, Java 1.4 compatibility issue Issue: 1475565.
- Changed logger.error into logger.debug when the exception can be disregarded. Issue: 1925603.
- Fixed issue with CLOB datatype in Derby. Issue: 1806363. Thanks to Brian Atkinson.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Just received word from the Agile 2008 organizing committee that the session Ixchel and I proposed, Boosting your testing productivity with Groovy, has been accepted, here is the abstract
Agile 2008 will take place Aug 4-8 at Toronto, see you there!
Developer testing, unit testing and/or test driven development should be in the vocabulary of every developer by now. Everyone knows that testing takes time but you shouldn?t skip testing because of a hard-to-meet deadline, what can you do to make sure you?ll have the following weekend free without worrying that a sudden call spoils the fun? the answer is letting your testing code be groovier. Groovy is a dynamic language for the JVM with close integration to the Java language, making it ideal for testing purposes. With Groovy you can write less code and be more expressive, you can leverage your knowledge on junit extensions (like dbUnit or XMLUnit) to speed up development, you can use GroovyMocks to intercept calls on concrete classes (easier to setup than EasyMock/JMock) and its also TestNG friendly because Groovy also supports JSR 175 annotations. Basic knowledge of the Groovy language, junit and testng is desired for attendees.
Agile 2008 will take place Aug 4-8 at Toronto, see you there!
Saturday, May 3, 2008
FEST stands for Fixtures for Easy Software Testing, it targets UI testing (Java Swing for the time being). Easyb makes Behavior Driven Development a snap. Use them together and you have a recipe for success. Let's revisit a previous example of FEST+Groovy, a very basic app that retrieves the definition of a word the user may type (very basic as it currently responds to a single word: pugnacious, but whose counting words ) Testing the happy path is pretty straight forward
Quick and to the point and quite understandable if you ask me, but the thing is that only developers like to read code. UI testing is not exactly a task developers like to do and is usually delegated to people that handle specs and lengthy docs. This is where easyb comes in, I'll let the code speak for itself
As you can see the actual code is exactly the same, but there is a nice separation of preconditions, effects and assertions, and if you enable reporting you get the following output
Now that is more like it don't you think? The very nature of easyb makes writing scenarios and stories quite simple, as a matter of fact anybody can do it. Once they are written a developer takes the executable spec and writes the code that makes the tests turn green, and everybody is content. I'm so loving easyb...
Keep on Groovying!
) Testing the happy path is pretty straight forwardQuick and to the point and quite understandable if you ask me, but the thing is that only developers like to read code. UI testing is not exactly a task developers like to do and is usually delegated to people that handle specs and lengthy docs. This is where easyb comes in, I'll let the code speak for itself
As you can see the actual code is exactly the same, but there is a nice separation of preconditions, effects and assertions, and if you enable reporting you get the following output
1 scenario (including 0 pending) executed successfully
Story: easyb fest
scenario User writes a word available in the dictionary
given WordFinder's UI is shown
when user types the word 'pugnacious'
when user clicks on the find button
then the correct answer is displayed (Combative in nature; belligerent.)
then the UI shutdowns itself
Now that is more like it don't you think? The very nature of easyb makes writing scenarios and stories quite simple, as a matter of fact anybody can do it. Once they are written a developer takes the executable spec and writes the code that makes the tests turn green, and everybody is content. I'm so loving easyb...
Keep on Groovying!
Friday, May 2, 2008
Last year I wrote a piece when JavaOne 2007 ended, looking back some things did change, others stayed the same. (expect some surprises in the following months)
All in all I look forward to a great event, remember to keep in touch via Twitter
- OpenJDK, I can see the tumbleweeds rolling in the wind...
- JavaFX continued to make the news, but the tools are nowhere to be found (sorry Sun NetBeans alone is not going to cut it). I agree with Rick Hightower on this one, unless there is Eclipse support (and I mean good support) then it is not going to be picked by a critical mass of developers. Content authors on the other hand *may* be able to use Macromedia's tools and then export to JFX (I'm hoping Sun finally showcases such a exporter next week).
- Guillaume reported that Groovy sessions at Jaxx 08 were full, leaving some people outside of the room. Though I don't wish for people to miss out the opportunity to hear and learn about Groovy I do hope Groovy sessions to be packed (Dave Klein has posted the full list here)
- Sun giving public support to JRuby rather than Groovy continues to be the talk among some (remember the last big flame war @ JavaLobby?), but even if they do not directly endorse/support Groovy with money it is still somewhere on their roadmap, Glassfish v3 has great support for Grails and NetBeans' Groovy support has received a facelift.
- The organizers are expecting 15k attendees, I remember we were close to 17k on 2006...
- Will AJAX be a strong presence again? surely the recent ExtJs controversy will be present in the halls
- Swing and Desktop Java, they are not dead!
(expect some surprises in the following months)All in all I look forward to a great event, remember to keep in touch via Twitter
