How to make your code more concise and well-behaved at the same time

Have you ever had an application that just behaved plain weird? You know, you click a button and nothing happens. Or the screen all the sudden turns blank. Or the application get into a “strange state” and you have to restart it for things to start working again.

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In order to smoke test web applications, I like to run-to-end smoke tests that start the web server and drives a web browser to interact with the application. Here is how this may look:

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“Problemet med Java er at det krever så mange abstraksjoner. Factories, proxies, rammeverk…” Min samtalepartner gjenfortalte inntrykket han hadde av de Java-programmerende kollegene sine.

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In HTML applications, jQuery has changed the way people thing about view rendering. Instead of an input or a text field in the view pulling data into it, the jQuery code pushes data into the view. How could this look in a server side situation like Java?

In this code example, I read an HTML template file from the classpath, set the value of an input field and append more data based on a template (also in the HTML file).

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There are only so many ways to test that your persistence layer is implemented correctly or that you’re using an ORM correctly. Here’s my canonical tests for a repository (Java-version):

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Sometimes, small questions lead to big answers. Sometimes these answers are controversial. One such question is “What does this warning about serialVersionUID mean”? All the advice out there basically is for developers who don’t know what’s going on to write code that will ignore errors when something unexpected happens. In my view – this is exactly the wrong approach. The safe way to act is to make sure that your program crashes if you don’t have control.

Java programmers usually get this warning when they write code that looks like this:

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I’m working on this idea, and I don’t know if it appeals to you guys. I’d like your input on whether this is something to explore further.

Here’s the deal: I’ve encountered teams who, when working with SOA technologies have been dragged into the mud by the sheer complexity of their tools. I’ve only seen this in Java, but I’ve heard from some C# developers that they recognize the phenomenon there as well. I’d like to explore an alternative approach.

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Changing your perspective even a small amount can have profound effects on how you approach your system.

Let’s say you’re writing a web application in Java. In the system you deal with orders, customers and products. As a web application, your classes include staples like PersonController, PersonRepository, CustomerController and OrderService. How do you organize your classes into packages?

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Do you know how to apply coding practices the technology stack that you use on a daily basis? Do you know how the technology stack works? For many programmers, it’s easy enough to use test-driven development with a trivial example, but it can be very hard to know how to apply it to the problems you face every day in your job.

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On larger projects, I’ve always ended up resorting to writing down a lot of detailed specifications, many of which are wrong, irrelevant or we might not be ready to answer them yet. On small projects, the dialogue between the customer and the developers can flow easy, and good things happen.

The quick analysis

Developer: … so we’re going to complete the current task tomorrow or the day after. Could we discuss what to do next before you’re off to your next meeting?

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• Johannes Brodwal's blog
• Feed: Thinking Inside a Bigger Box
• Original article