Unit testing is tedious, but it has saved my bacon so many times already that even though it eats my time I still religiously create unit test cases for every important business logic use cases. I’ve been using Spring’s integration with JUnit and its very cool transaction support for test cases. Unfortunately with this approach, I have to craft test data to test every single code path for complex business logics. Although the setup, tearDown and rollback upon completion of the test case is handy, I still have to carefully craft the data.

Enter EasyMock, I know i’m late in the game with mock objects, but in the quest to meet deadlines and still have close to 100% test coverage (well I try to anyway), I haven’t had the time to actually check out what’s new in the TDD world.

At its most basic level, it allows you to record and replay the expected method calls and return values for methods that are being used by the object/method that you are currently testing. Aside from mocking interface classes you can also partially mock concrete classes (meaning mock only selected methods) using EasyMock’s Class Extension. With this, you have fine grain control on how each and every test case will behave.

Check it out at http://www.easymock.org

I’ll post a tutorial in my next blog post. There’s so much stuff in there that I haven’t used that I’ll have to start a new tutorial series just to cover this very cool mock framework.

Just upgraded my Macbook Pro (3,1) to Snow Leopard and the increase in speed and responsiveness of the system is immediately apparent. While everything seems to be working fine, two of my work-related softwares are broken. One is Macports, the fix is quite easy, just an upgrade to the new Macports version and its good to go. The other one is Eclipse Galileo.

Since i’m primarily a java developer I need an updated JDK, Snow Leopard comes with a 64-bit Java 1.6; there’s a rumor going around that there is a 32-bit version, but I can’t seem to find it in my system. So with a 32-bit Eclipse, the IDE can’t detect any JDK in the system. The solution is quite simple, just download the classic 64-bit Eclipse (its at the bottom of the Eclipse download page). While with this approach, you have to install the plugins yourself, but it beats having an old JDK to work with.

No i’m not talking about frameworks that addresses their own unique business needs. I’m talking about your ORMs, MVC web frameworks, javascript (including ajax) frameworks, but for now i’m talking about your everyday java enterprise application. There is at least one of this monstrocities that is being build in every big company under the pretense of “We don’t need the other stuff that framework X offers”, or maybe you’ve heard of the priceless line “Framework X contains so much features that it can affect the scalability of our enterprise application”. So with those ammunition, management will give them a go signal to build their very own abomination; maybe 2 years down the line some moron will pick up a business magazine seeing those new fangled application servers and will decide that they have to migrate to it to keep up with the trend, and yes, you’ve guess it… their framework is not compatible with the new application server and they will have to spend several thousand dollars to port it. Standards and open source frameworks exists for a reason.