testingReflections.com - java

ISubmitBlogPosts - a nice twist on Hungarian Notation for Interfaces...

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 17:29:46 -0600

I've been pairing with Andy Palmer over this last week. I have to say it's been a lot of fun... and I think we've learned a lot from the experience. One of the things I learned from Andy this week was an innovative use of Hungarian notation for interfaces... Andy told me about Udi Dahan's presentation on intentions and interfaces (PDF)

JUnitPerf, try it!

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 15:27:12 -0500

I just wanted to bring everyone's attention to JUnitPerf, a set of decorators for JUnit to provide a simple means to acquire timings, and do paced-threading. Essentially implementing bare-bones performance testing in the Junit framework.

Mike Clark is credited with this gem. No relation.
http://www.clarkware.com/cgi/blosxom/2003/

Google Web Toolkit - Web UIs & Ajax... but in Java

Sun, 21 May 2006 05:02:20 -0500

[textile]From the "GWT Product Overview":http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/overview.html via the "GWT Homepage":http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java development framework that lets you escape the matrix of technologies that make writing AJAX applications so difficult and error prone. With GWT, you can develop and debug AJAX applications in the Java language using the Java development tools of your choice. When you deploy your application to production, the GWT compiler to translates your Java application to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Roll Your Own Tools.. Real-time Graphing and Round Robin Data Storage

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 14:40:12 -0500

I have spent a lot of time playing around with graphics libraries and toolkits for integrating real-time graphs within my own testing and monitoring tools. It seems like there are many open source tools available in the world of performance testing and system monitoring. And lots of people roll their own tools in whatever programming language they are into... but many lack graphics capabilities.

Two of the toolkits/libraries I end up using often for my own homebrew test tools are: RRDTool , and JRobin.

from the RRDTool site:
"RRD is the Acronym for Round Robin Database. RRD is a system to store and display time-series data (i.e. network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, server load average). It stores the data in a very compact way that will not expand over time, and it can create beautiful graphs. It can be used via simple shell scripts or as a perl module."

So...
RRDTool is a really good back-end for storing time-series data; which is pretty much all we care about when we are doing performance testing. It has bindings for various scripting languages, or can be invoked from the command line. If you are developing tools that need a data repository and graphing capabilities, this provides you both. You create an RRD and then you begin inserting data values at regular intervals. You then call the graphing API to have a graph displayed. The cool thing about this data storage is its “round robin” nature. You define various time spans, and the granularity at which you want them stored. I fixed binary file is created, and this never grows in size over time. As you insert more data, it is inserted into each span. As results are collected, they are averaged and rolled into successive time spans. It makes a much more efficient system than using your own complex object structures, or a relational database, or file system storage.

You will probably recognize the graphs it creates, as RRDTool is integrated in many popular monitoring tools (it is Free/Open Source, GPL License). I have built many tools around RRDTool, and it is really a nice system.

If you are in the Java world, there is a very cool project named JRobin. JRobin is a clone of RRDTool in pure Java. So you can create RRD's directly from your Java code.. and all in memory if you want to!

Some days I pretend to be a Java programmer, so I had to build a tool using JRobin. As a proof of concept, I wrote a small network latency monitoring tool. It shows off some of JRobin's capabilities. It pings a host at a given interval and records the latency. A graph of the network latency is rendered in real-time onto a Swing panel.

Here is my network latency monitoring tool: NetPlot (includes Java source code, GPL Licensed)

The tool itself is just a trivial example, and really isn't the point. But you could easily adapt this code or create your own to develop real-time graphs of your own time-series data.

(hmm.. I wonder if I could hook this into JMeter? probably..)

(How freaking ironic?.. I've been using this thing for a while now, but I decided to check the JRobin web site while I'm writing this.. and the developer just ceased development of the project and turned over all related rights to OpenNMS. can someone reading this please take over JRobin maintenance? .. erm seriously)

-Corey Goldberg
www.goldb.org

Eclipse Profiler...

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 01:02:25 -0500

[textile]I was asked the other day if I could speak on a topic around the theme of "Shifting Paradigms in Performance Modelling"...

One of the interesting things about agile projects that the architecture emerges and evolves (as opposed to being designed up-front).

So, how do you keep up? How can you model performance if you don't know what the architecture will look like far enough into the future to justify modelling? Do you need to?

Fit / Watir / JWebUnit Eclipse Plugin...

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 01:02:41 -0500

[textile]From the "AutAT Website":http://boss.bekk.no/boss/autat/ ...

AutAT -- An Eclipse Plugin for Automatic Acceptance Testing of Web Applications AutAT * is an open source Eclipse plugin, * makes test driven development of web applications easier, * contains a rich graphical editor for specifying how web-sites should function, * is written using the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework (GEF),

Headless Hello World at EclipseCon 2006!

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 03:30:33 -0600

Way back in August I wrote a pictorial guide to creating a headless hello world eclipse plug-in, and then in December I tapped the power of my massive blog fanbase to shill for votes for my EclipseCon short talk proposal. Today I'm happy to report that our efforts were a success and to invite you, if you're going to be at EclipseCon, to stop by March 22nd at 4:15 (that's 16:15 for my international audience) and listen to the very exciting short talk "Hello World" as a Headless Eclipse Plug-in. I promise it will be worth all 9 minutes of your time.

Read the full blog entry

Toplink-in-memory: run database tests in memory

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 15:11:14 -0500

Java library to speed up the running of automated tests for projects that use toplink to access databases. It allows you to run the application in memory, rather than against a database.

Refactoring in NetBeans 4.1

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 01:00:21 -0500

Depending on the tools you use, refactoring can be either time-consuming or quick and easy. Fortunately, NetBeans comes with a solid amount of refactoring support built in. This article aims to teach you about some of the more common refactoring options, as well as to show you ways to use these options in everyday situations with your Java technology source code. NetBeans presently supports four primary refactoring approaches:

Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 01:00:44 -0500

Maven is a new project management and comprehension tool which provides an elegant way to share build logic across projects. In terms of capabilities, Maven is an improvement to Apache Ant-thanks to numerous plug-ins and built-in integration with unit testing frameworks such as JUnit. Tired of writing the same build logic for every project? Using Maven, you can leverage the experience of the community to avoid the tedious process of creating yet another build script for each new project.

POJO Application Frameworks: Spring Vs. EJB 3.0

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 01:00:54 -0500

These two frameworks share a common core design philosophy: they both aim to deliver middleware services to loosely coupled plain old Java objects (POJOs). The framework "wires" application services to the POJOs by intercepting the execution context or injecting service objects to the POJO at runtime. The POJOs themselves are not concerned about the "wiring" and have little dependency upon the framework. As a result, developers can focus on the business logic, and unit test their POJOs without the framework. In addition, since POJOs do not need to inherit from framework classes or implement framework interfaces, the developers have a high degree of flexibility to build inheritance structures and construct applications.

Agile Java: Assertions and Annotations [PDF]

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 01:03:10 -0500

J2SE 5.0 introduced a new facility known as annotations. Annotations are a metaprogramming facility that allow you to mark code with arbitrarily defined tags. The tags (generally) have no meaning to the Java compiler or runtime itself. Instead, other tools can interpret these tags. Examples of tools for which annotations might be useful include IDEs, testing tools, profiling tools, and code-generation tools.

JTR: Java Test Runner

Thu, 19 May 2005 00:36:22 -0500

A Java framework that helps developers in building test suites. JTR is based on concepts such as Inversion of Control, and is ready for EJB and JMS testing.

plotting one object-db what selfmade by xml+db for sectionbase

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 20:42:01 -0500

I want to plot the next works in priority level so as to make my loads to be lightest.As for the major issue, I should develop the Clinlic, Blog, application/invitation module, the charge module, and PhysicalExm module, etc, going along with the modules, I should have to refit the sections from xml to database sooner or later, by the reasons of two:1. as long as the sections grown up more than twenty, it will be difficult to manage by xml;

Setting Up VirtualMock in the Eclipse IDE

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 11:59:27 -0500

One of the things I teach as part of Team Agile is how to do Test Driven Development and write unit tests in Java. Yes. This is .NET weblogs, but the following information is so scarce and hard to find I just have to post it. After a long time of trial and error trying to run a framework called "VirtualMock" (which is similar to TypeMock in .NET in its purposes). Anyway - it's impossible to figure out how to make the thing work under Eclipse - no documentation found on the net for this. Luckily, Eli Lopian of Amdocs finally found a way to make it work with the Eclipse IDE. He was kind enough to let me post the steps he used to make this happen so that future generations could use this practically non-existent documentation as they search it via Google: Hi, Here are the instuctions for setting up using virtual mock in eclipse. A.1. Setting Up VirtualMocks in eclipse Following is the method to set up virtual mocks in eclipse (3.0). 1. Install AJDT (The AspectJ Development Tool) and restart eclipse.