A canonical web test
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: public class...
View ArticleOffensive programming
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...
View ArticleHaving fun with Git
I recently read The Git Book. As I went through the Git Internals parts, it struck me how simple and elegant the structure of Git really is. I decided that I just had to create my own little library to...
View ArticleAnnouncing EAXY: Making XML easier in Java
XML libraries in Java is a minefield. The amount of code required to manipulate and read XML is staggering, the risk of getting class path problems with different libraries is substantial and the...
View ArticleHumble architects
Humility is not a very common trait with software architects. After having worked with a few awful architects and recently with a very pleasant one, I’ve compiled a few of my experiences in the way...
View ArticleWhy I stopped using Spring
My post on DZone about Humble Architects sparked somewhat of a controversy, especially around my disparaging comments regarding Spring and Dependency Injection Frameworks. In this post, I expand on why...
View ArticleThe madness of layered architecture
I once visited a team that had fifteen layers in their code. That is: If you wanted to display some data in the database in a web page, that data passed through 15 classes in the application. What did...
View ArticleThe lepidopterist’s curse: Playing with java.time
Pop quiz: What will be the output of this little program? public class DateFun { public static void main(String[] args) { long hours = getHoursOfDay(LocalDate.now(), ZoneId.systemDefault());...
View ArticleDead simple configuration
Whole frameworks have been written with the purpose of handling the configuration of your application. I prefer a simpler way. If by configuration we mean “everything that is likely to vary between...
View ArticlePromises you can trust
JavaScript Promises provide a strong programming model for the future of JavaScript development. So here I’m playing with promises. First I need a bit of a package.json file: { "name": "promises",...
View ArticleA wicked Java trick to make the JVM forget to check exceptions
I’ve long time been a critic of the mechanism of compiler checked exceptions in Java. Whether you love them or hate then, one thing is sure: There’s situations where you don’t want to have to deal with...
View ArticleA canonical XML test
I recently did a few days of TDD training for a client. They asked me to help them test and refactor a class that created XML from an internal domain model. This gave me the opportunity to examine a...
View ArticleDirty Code Monday!
Lately I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to fall into the trap of not challenging our ideas about the code we’re working on. In order to challenge the default mindset of Clean Code, I recently...
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