I finally managed to finish my article on testing web applications with JWebUnit and Jetty. The article is published on java.net as last Thursday’s featured article. Enjoy!

WordPress has not been good to me lately. For some reason, this site loads really, really slow now, and I’m still trying to figure out why. If you know why WordPress may be misbehaving, please let me know. Until I fix the problem: All pages on the site still load, just give them some time… Comments:...

There’s one question you really should be able to answer about your software project, whether you’re a project manager, a tester, an architect or a developer: “How are we going to put this safely into production and get it out again if we need to?” I think this is what Configuration Management tries...

I have been watching videos from the Technology, Education and Design conference (TED) all afternoon. One particularly fascinating talk was Barry Schwartz talking about The Paradox of Choice. I find an almost Buddhist-like understanding of the problem of humanity in the modern world in his talk. But...

CIO JP Rangaswami at investment bank Dresder Kleinwort Wasserstein talks about why he considers open source a corporate IT asset. In this talk, Rangaswami describes how DrKW wanted to create an internal incubator environment in order to combat skill attrition in the late 90s. In the course of doing ...

This post is currently only a draft. Input on how to improve the structure is very welcome “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” - Lao-Tzu When doing architecture, we always have to content with the present state of the system. It is extremely tempting to ignore this picture of ...

Sverre Huseby examines some security issues with Spring-MVC. As it turns out, the Spring JSP form-taglib provide no HTML-escaping by default, making it very easy to get Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities included in the code. The article comes complete with a standalone application that illustrate...

Update: Added retrospective result example I learned by favorite team building exercise on the ROOTS conference in Bergen three years ago. Alistair Cockburn conducted a great workshop that really drove home the lessons of iterative development at the same time as it showed a very useful technique fo...

Inspired by Per Mellqvist (and myself, to be fair), I wanted to explore the possibility of using a generic DAO or Repository interface for REST. Based on this simple idea, I was able to create a very cute and testable prototype of a full Web Service stack for REST based Web Services. The most intere...

Some time back, I watched a video David Heinemeier Hansson give a talk on ActiveResource on RailsConf. The thing that struck me is how much Rails’ ideas are connected to those of Domain-Driven Design. Watching DHH is like seeing a version of Eric Evans on speed. The video is long, but very entertain...

Based on the US Department of Defense standard DOD-STD-2167A, we have a well-defined process often referred to as Waterfall. If you are not familiar with the process, here is a short introduction. A project in the waterfall process goes through four phases before the project is completed. The first ...

In a recent thread on the Pragmatic Programmer mailing list, Dave Stagner said: [….] I think most software hovers near the border between “barely works” and “almost works”. Comments: [dave] - Aug 1, 2007 So much for my 15 minutes of fame. :}

Lately, I have had the rather dubious pleasure of reviewing some of our existing systems and find a plan for improving the maintainability of these systems. I have not done much work like this before, and I came in unprepared for the experience. Most systems that have been maintained for a number of...

Updated (again) based on comments from helpful readers Recently, I have discovered that managers who come into Java projects are totally unprepared for the reality that they face. Some programming environments have been basically stable for decades. COBOL has been stable from before most of us were ...

How do you control an agile project? I have had many discussions with people lately about how to manage the budget and estimation of an agile project. The following post argues that a project with a business case of $20 million should deliver in steps of no more than $500,000. The argument is sadly ...

Ron Jeffries reminds us: “… hours aren’t burndown. Accomplishments are. A team that focuses on hours isn’t focusing on getting things done.[…] The point […] is getting backlog items done, not getting tasks done” This really cannot be said too often! Via Jason Yip

This phase has been stuck in my head lately: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. It was first used by the linguist Noam Chomsky as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, yet has no meaning. Interestingly, in 1985 this was taken up as a challenge. The result was a literary competi...

Hey, commons-logging team, you’re on notice! Here is a dump of the Maven 2 dependencies from the project I use for my article on embedded integration testing: no.brodwall.demo:web-demo:war:1.0-SNAPSHOT org.springframework:spring:jar:2.0.1:compile _commons-logging:commons-logging:jar:1.1:compile_ ava...

Do you speak test? In that case: Hello web application: public class WebIntegrationTest extends net.sourceforge.jwebunit.WebTestCase { public void testIndex() { beginAt("/index.html"); assertTextPresent("Hello world"); } private org.mortbay.jetty.Server server; protected void setUp() throws Exceptio...

The more I code, the fewer dependencies I am willing to create. For example, I used to have a common super interface that all persistent objects must inherit from in order to have an id-field. I used to have a common DAO interface that all DAOs implemented. But these add hard dependencies in my code...

I have just one thing to say: w00t! Failing unit test Unit test succeeds Thanks to Litrik de Roy Litrik used my C code to control the lights of the Dell XPS computer and integrated them into an Eclipse plugin. Coolest plugin EWAR!!one!! See more about it on the project blog. Comments: [Stein Kåre Sk...

Ralph Johnson discusses the use of Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) If you don’t have good architects, big systems will end up as big balls of mud. A lot of companies live with it, but there are certainly big payoffs if you can avoid it. The main problem is that there aren’t enough goo...

This post is an entry in my ongoing series about web integration testing with Jetty. See post 1, 2 and 3 in the series for more information. I often find that a web interface needs to let a user select one of a list of objects as a relation to the object he is editing. This is the basic and simple w...

In my previous two posts about integration testing with jetty [1][2], I have showed how to test a simple web application with Jetty and how to expand this application with a fake DAO implementation to test display and updates of data through the web interface. In this penultimate post, I will descri...

I have exported the XPS light control source code into my subversion repository. The software is currently set up to build with Cygwin. As an added bonus, I now have added a target that creates a dll so the code can be reused more easily. How to use: xps\_lights>_make all_ rm -f *.o *.dll *.exe gcc ...

Do you speak test? In that case: Hello web application: public class WebIntegrationTest extends net.sourceforge.jwebunit.WebTestCase { public void testIndex() { beginAt("/index.html"); assertTextPresent("Hello world"); } private org.mortbay.jetty.Server server; protected void setUp() throws Exceptio...

The security people at my were suggesting that we needed to create an encryption service, to securely store passwords so that even rogue DBAs could not get at them. The idea is that no matter how good your access is to the database, you shouldn’t be able to decrypt the passwords unless you have the ...

In my last post, I wrote about four integration scenarios using databases: Reference data, Consolidated view, Subscription and Publishing. Of these, the Consolidated View scenario requires the most interaction between the server and the client roles. This post will examine how to make the pieces fit...

In my last post on using the database for integration, I argued that the best metaphor for creating systems that are interconnected is that of One-Large Database. Carl-Henrik asked some very relevant questions about this, which I will interpret (for now) mainly as “how do you avoid drowning in compl...

I got the following addition on my Dell XPS LED code from David Pritchard. The new version of the code has a “-touchpad” argument. Specify “-touchpad 1” to turn the XPS 2 touchpad light on, “-touchpad 0” to turn it off. Here is the updated source code and executable. The executable should work witho...