Many people enjoy splitting testing up in a myriad of test types: Acceptance Tests, Functional Tests, Integration Tests, Performance Test, Technical Tests, Unit Tests. I have myself been guilty of such terminology as “embedded integration tests” and “requirement tests”. However, what unites the tests are more important than what divides them. The divisions are fuzzy, and they should be.

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Java.net’s latest poll asks: should checked exceptions be removed from the Java language. Sadly, the poll is not going the way it should right now. Many people feel checked exceptions are key to reliable programming. They are wrong. Please: Read this post, and help improve the Java programming language by voting “Yes” to remove checked exceptions.

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Anders Nordås shows how to throw a checked exception without declaring a throws clause. The method uses some inherently evil mechanisms (the name of the class “sun.misc.Unsafe” should be a tip of), and like Anders says, this should probably never be used in production.

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The code I write in Ruby is higher quality than the code I write in Java. Why? Because the language supports better abstractions. It lets me express a problem once, and reuse it many places. The strength of an environment comes from the quality of the libraries, and the qualities of the libraries comes from the features of the language. In this post, I will review a proposal to make Java a better language: First-Class Methods. See how much better the code looks with it.

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On my project, we use Maven to build our software and FitNesse to write functional specifications. However, it was obvious that FitNesse wasn’t designed by Maven-fans. When I use Maven, I already have control over my classpath, and specifying it in every FitNesse test gets to be old really fast. Why can’t I just inherit the project class path, and start FitNesse using maven-antrun-plugin or just from my IDE?

I found a neat way to implement this by overriding FitNesse. Using the same technique, I’m also able to debug FitNesse tests.

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Last night, I worked until after midnight trying to get our application up and running after some seemingly inconsequential changes in Spring-XML configuration. Our application consists of a total of 32 modules (including 6 wars and one “server” module that packages them, and 11 modules that are shared with other projects). Most of these modules have Spring-XML fragments that are included in a few different ways, with the result that a nobody on the team actually understands how it fits together.

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My talk at JavaZone went surprisingly well. The fact that the projector went dead and that I was planning on opening with a demo raised my pulse, but I felt I managed to get my message across and that people were happy.

The talk was about how we use Jetty to manage the full deployment life cycle of our application. I explained how we had implemented this and what problems we had solved. Here’s a quick summary of our life cycle process:

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Stand up and be counted. Which one do you think is best of the following?

Package by layer:

• com.app.controllers
• com.app.model
• com.app.repositories
• com.app.exception

Or package by feature:

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In Let your examples flow, Dan North describes how “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY) isn’t necessarily the most important guideline for tests. While I agree with his conclusions, I think the DRY principle is still extremely important for tests.

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