Posts Tagged ‘Java’

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Would you start mocking me?

August 5th, 2010

One of the primary principles of unit testing is to test a small piece of functionality in isolation. In order to achieve this, mock objects are often necessary. Historically using mocks could be quite painful. After using several mock frameworks, my favorite by far is Mockito.

Tutorial

In this tutorial we will walk through examples of the most common features of Mockito. My sample project can be downloaded here.

Interfaces and Implementation

Some mocking frameworks only supported mocking interfaces. As a result our projects became bloated with useless interfaces that were only used for testing.  Mockito creates mock objects with interfaces or classes.
» Read more: Would you start mocking me?

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Rendering Global t:messages After Redirect

March 8th, 2010

A common problem when working with JSF is getting global info messages  via <t:messages globalOnly="true"> or <f:messages globalOnly="true"> to display messages set in the previous request when you have a <redirect/> in your faces-config for a particular page You will not see your <t:messages> that are set on the previous page.

The Problem

For instance, say you have two pages – page1.xhtml and page2.xhtml. In your faces-config.xml, you will have 2 entries.

» Read more: Rendering Global t:messages After Redirect

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Environment Specific Properties in Spring

March 1st, 2010

On many occasions I want to be able to inject environment specific property values into my Spring managed beans. These may be things like web service endpoints, database URLs, etc. Values I know for each environment at build time, but I want to use the same WAR/EAR file in each environment. I would like to keep the actual values separate from the Spring config files themselves. And I would really like to manage a set of default values for each property, so that I do not need to specify a value for every property in every environment (ex. my credit card processing URL for dev, test, uat is the same, but for production it is different.)

» Read more: Environment Specific Properties in Spring

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Replacing and Patching Java Application and Core classes

February 15th, 2010

Why would you ever need that?

Say you get a jar file. After using the jar for a while you realise that there is a bug in a class in the jar file. Unfortunately you also find out that the jar is no longer supported and there is no way you will get a fix from the author (who is long gone fishing).

In order to solve this issue, you first need to get the source of the class. If you are lucky enough and the author did not obfuscate the class file you can decompile it with a decompiler (my favourite one is JD-GUI).

» Read more: Replacing and Patching Java Application and Core classes

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Keep your dataTable clean with a custom popup

January 13th, 2010

The basic idea is to output some data to a user in a table and allow them to take an action on each row individually. A fairly straightforward solution is to create a separate page to link to, passing the necessary row information along. If the action is simple enough, like a single checkbox, you could just embed the necessary component(s) in each row of the table. Too many components, however, can bloat the table and make the UI cumbersome to the user. Instead we can create a popup window to overlay our page, containing whatever components are needed, and activate it by a link embedded in our table. Passing the row information is a little trickier, but the result is a cleaner interface and a better user experience.
» Read more: Keep your dataTable clean with a custom popup

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Spring’s refreshable beans

January 8th, 2010

A couple of days ago I found out about a really nice feature in Spring, called ‘refreshable bean’.

Spring’s vision a refreshable bean is a dynamic-language-backed bean that monitors changes to its source code and then reloads itself when changes occur. And it is all this is done without restarting/re-deploying entire app. Sweet!
» Read more: Spring’s refreshable beans

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Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee – Day 3

October 26th, 2009

Agile Architecture – Technologies and Patterns – Kirk Knoernschild

Some of the questions this session set out to attempt to answer were

  1. What is architecture?
  2. What defines architecture?
  3. What are architectural decisions?
  4. Is architecture a forward only decision?

Several definitions of Architecture were quoted from prior literature. Such as architecture being the the shared understanding of the system being built. Shared understanding between a group of people who need to communicate about it — developers and architects, or technical and management etc.
Lean principles are you delay » Read more: Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee – Day 3

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Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee – Day 2

October 21st, 2009

Running a day late on my posts. Here’s day two (yesterday)

Grails Quick Start – David Klien

David walked through the creation of a Grails web application to track a JUG’s meeting schedule. I liked his presentation style or maybe because the room wasn’t very crowded things just registered better. Picked up a few tips such as the Bootstrap class. Grails still has a ways to go in the eclipse tooling. It would’ve been nice to have been able to File –> New Project and follow along. Too bad IntelliJIDEA CE doesn’t support grails though there has been plenty of buzz on the latest STS. Downloading this right now. Only 3 more hours for the download to complete!

I think I’m beginning to dig duck typing. All in all the presentation encouraged me to put my head down and hammer out a sample app to start building some grails knowledge. More homework! » Read more: Musings of a SpringOne 2009 Attendee – Day 2

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Hands-on OSGi and Modular Web Applications – Part I – Toes First

October 19th, 2009

A Brief Introduction

This is the first in a series of blog posts that will attempt to demystify OSGi and demonstrate how it enables the creation of modular web applications. We will explore various aspects of the technology along with the challenges of using this technology. I encourage you to join in the discussion by posting any comments about your own experiences or challenges you have faced developing OSGi applications. We start with the assumption that we understand what OSGi is and the specific modularity problem it tries to solve. Here are some resources you can visit to read up on this.

  1. http://neilbartlett.name/blog/2008/06/06/what-is-osgi-for/ – this one talks about the problem space
  2. http://www.infoq.com/interviews/osgi-adrian-colyer – this one brings Spring and OSGi together

Turn on the ignition

Lets get started. This first post will show you how to launch an OSGi framework and how you can interact with it. You will first need to have a JDK installed. I recommend the Sun JDK. You then need an OSGi implementation. » Read more: Hands-on OSGi and Modular Web Applications – Part I – Toes First

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Hibernate Criteria trick

October 8th, 2009

So here’s the situation.

Let’s say I have this query here:

SELECT * FROM employees
WHERE employee_id NOT IN ( 1234 , 3456 , 5678 );

How do we do that with the Hibernate Criteria object with a Restriction?  You would think that the Restrictions API would have a “not in” method, since it does have a not equals method(ne), but alas, there is nothing…

Well, here’s the solution:

//Create the criteria
Criteria crit = factory.getCurrentSession().createCriteria(Employee.class);
 
//add my restriction where idList is a list of emp ids that need to be excluded
crit.add(Restrictions.not(Restrictions.in("employeeId", idList)));
 
//get some results
List employees = crit.list();

There you go!  Now you know this neat little trick and you can use it in your own app… Be forewarned though, it can be slow…

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