Rocket Surgery

The second edition of Josh Bloch’s outstanding book Effective Java is coming out June 8, 2008.  I can’t wait.  If you don’t have the original version of this book, you are truly missing out.  It’s a great near-bible of doing things the right way with Java so code can be maintained and relied upon.

It’s available for order on Amazon.  And in interest of full disclosure, I have no financial interest in his book (unless having co-workers and colleagues write better code counts).

Andy Glover has written a post on using Gant with Hudson at his blog, The Disco Blog.

In case you didn’t know, Gant is a tool that uses Groovy scripts to invoke Ant tasks, so you write your builds as a Groovy script instead of an XML file, but you still get to use Ant’s power.  I may just start playing with this…

One of my favorite books on UI Design is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. While this great book is focused on Web UI design, the central theme is universal: As much as possible, software should be so self-obvious how to use it that no manual is necessary.

As I see it, at least one of three things is possible:

1. The creators of AnkhSVN should read this book
2. AnkhSVN cannot create branches
3. I’m an idiot.

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In my last post I talked about getting involved with the Hudson project. In this post I will describe the steps I took to set up my build environment.

1. Get JDK 6.0 (Hudson cannot be built using 5.0 or earlier) and install it.
2. Get Subversion and install it.

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In an earlier post I wrote about my experiences trying to write a plugin for Hudson. In that article, I wrote about how I basically gave up because I was having too hard a time wrestling with Maven for the small amount of code I was writing.

Well, time passes, and I decided to try again, but this time I decided to look into what it would take to fix an issue I’ve had with Hudson. (For the curious: at the time of this writing, Hudson cannot verify that your LDAP settings are correct if your server does not allow anonymous binding - issue 1589).

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In an earlier post I wrote about how you can use JMeter to do automated functional and regression testing for web services. In this post I will talk about how you can parameterize your tests from external files to quickly get more thorough tests.

Parameterizing tests means that you run the test with different data each time, the data being passed in as parameters to your test. Obviously it would be preferable to run the same test 50 times with different values than to explicity put 50 different tests in the script that are identical except for the value used (duh.)

JMeter has a facility for doing just that. In my opinion, it’s a bit crude, but it works, and that’s what really counts.

Let’s start with a JMeter test that calls a web service. (You can download my sample). The test calls a web service that gives you the words for an integer (e.g., “fifteen” for 15), and calls the service three times with the same value (15) hard-coded in it, and looks for a 200 response code from the service, and the word “fifteen” in the response SOAP envelope. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I took one for the team and took the boys to see Speed Racer so my wife wouldn’t have to.

Ouch.

This is the second worst movie I can remember seeing — the first being “Baby Geniuses 2: Superbabies”.  It looked like a big box of crayons threw up on the screen.  Or maybe it was like being in a cement mixer with 800 tons of fireworks.  It was horrifyingly colorful, frenetic, loud, hyper, and just plain dumb.  The movie isn’t so much presented as inflicted.  Hard to believe that John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, and Christina Ricci, all fine actors, would stoop to this.  I certainly hope they were paid well.

Andy Glover at Stelligent has posted a useful article on his company’s blog about using Subversion at the command line. Most people never really learn to use the Subversion commands because the graphical tools are usually so good that 95% or more of what we need to do can be done from within the IDE with a click or two. Andy goes into some detail about what goes on under the covers and how you can harness some of that power in the raw.  Click here to read it.

I watched Gone Baby Gone over the weekend. Boy am I glad my wife didn’t watch it with me.

See, my wife really only likes light romantic comedies (think Meg Ryan).  This movie is anything but light.  A Boston white trash mother ’s 4 year old daughter is abducted, and Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan, a shacking-up couple of private detectives, are hired by the mother’s sister-in-law (and brother) to find her.

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I needed an application, available to my entire development team, to provide RSS feeds for commit activity in our Subversion repository. I found a couple of items that looked reasonable, but they required scripting languages I could not use in my environment - I needed a Java-based solution.

So I decided to write it.

To access Subversion, I used SVNKit, an all-java library for SVN access. To create the RSS feed file (which is just an XML file) I used JDOM, my favorite XML handling library.

To deploy it, just deploy the WAR File to your Servlet container. SvnRss web archive (WAR file)

To use it, hit the app, passing the SVN url as a query parameter (if your aggregator gives you trouble, try URL encoding it). If you need to authenticate to access the repository, specify uid=yourusername and pwd=password as query parameters as well. By default, the feed includes the last 100 revisions, but you can override this with the numRevisions=nn query parameter.

Example invocations:

http://yourserver/SvnRss/SvnRssServlet?svnUrl=svn://yourrepository:1230/java/trunk

http://yourserver/SvnRss/SvnRssServlet?svnUrl=svn://yourrepository:1230/java/trunk&uid=kescobar&pwd=whatsamanmonth

http://yourserver/SvnRss/SvnRssServlet?svnUrl=svn://yourrepository:1230/java/trunk&numRevisions=25

The source code (in an Eclipse project) is also available. SvnRss source code (Zip file)