I’ve pair programmed the Java EE spike kata in Eclipse with a number of people, I’ve found that a number of keyboard short cuts and preference settings recur as useful new information. I’ve compiled the most popular ones in this article. The article is subject to change, but I won’t change the number of shortcuts.

Top five shortcuts

There are some keyboard short cuts that everyone who uses Eclipse should know:

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After seeing some of the great examples of coders working on practiced problems on KataCasts, I decided to try make my own. I am not happy with the pacing of the video. I’m about a minute too early relative to the music.

But I thought I’d post the video here, to see what you all think. Comments are welcome!

I hope the video will demonstrate how to use refactoring effectively to drive the design of a program.

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Lately, I’ve been working on two code katas, that is, programming exercises that I repeat until the motions are secure in my muscle memory. The katas I’ve chosen are:

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For å bli bedre må man trene. For å bli bedre med avanserte ting, må man forstå de grunnleggende tingene bra. For å vite hvorfor man bruker avanserte verktøy, må man prøve å jobbe uten dem. Derfor har jeg de siste ukene trent mange ganger på å lage en veldig enkel webapplikasjon i Java. For hele applikasjonen har jeg startet med å skrive testene før koden som implementerer funksjonaliteten.

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Just three weeks ago, I was asked to step in for Ted Neward to give a tutorial at Öredev on Effective Enterprise Java. As I did not have time to get the tutorial materials printed, I present them here on the web for the participants and others.

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When I write Java-projects that produce web pages, I test on several levels. First, I use Jetty and WebDriver to test the result via http. (WebDriver even lets me test JavaScript!)

But for speed and agility, unit-level tests beat even the fastest integration level tests. Unit tests run much much faster, and lets me pinpoint problems much more accurately. As a general rule: If you introduce a bug, you want a unit test to be the one that sees it first.

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What will the daily experience of software development look like, say, five years from now? Have our current processes reached their peak, or will the world continue to change? Alan Kay said “the easiest way to predict the future is to invent it.” Here are some ideas of the future I want to invent: I hope it will be dramatically better than what we currently do.

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In my current project, we use Flex as the user interface framework of choice. Flex has some nice features, but it takes a long time to build changes and start up, so it takes a while to validate our changes. Yesterday, we found a problem with one our UI components, and used JUnit to hunt down the same problem all over our code.

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Here’s a neat trick if you want set an object in a specific state in a unit test, but you don’t want to violate encapsulation:

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This is a test case from my current project:

Scenario: Finish gathering information
Given I have an open case
And the case has a task "gather information from X"
And the case has a task "gather information from Y"
When the user confirms that task "gather information from X" is completed
And the user confirms that task "gather information from Y" is completed
Then the case should generate a new task "evaluate customer standing"

It seems pretty run of the mill. A tester will sit down with a bunch of these and try out the application.

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