Let me start this post by saying that I've never used Mock Objects in my JUnit tests. Simon digs it, crazybob is an advocate and so is the gang that wrote Open Source Programming. In fact, the OSP book says that your unit tests should only take a couple of seconds to run! A couple of seconds!? Mine aren't that fast, which definitely makes me think I should look at Mocks to try to speed things up.
However, there is a method to my madness. Almost all my tests depend on a database connection and use DBUnit to populate the database before running. This can be time consuming, but it's not too bad for what I'm getting: real tests that verify the environment, not just the code. I just ran all tests in the application - 8 minutes 7 seconds - for 165 JUnit/Cactus tests and ~25 WebTest (JSP) tests.
If I did use Mocks, I wouldn't have discovered all the bugs in my code this week. When migrating from MySQL to DB2, I found that some things worked on MySQL, but they didn't on DB2. I modified the code, doing some tweaks to make Hibernate happy, and voila - now everything works on DB2 and MySQL. Furthermore, all my errors occurred when running my app in the container, and when I used simple JUnit tests (on my Managers) to test the same logic, it worked.
Who knows, I'm definitely learning new stuff everyday. Maybe it's possible that Mocks could do all this, but testing the production environment seems pretty important to me.
I noticed from reading JavaLobby's Weekly News that Coldtags has a new version:
Coldbeans Software announced the major new release of Coldtags suite. This suite provides 160+ custom
JSP tags for common programming tasks faced by JSP developers. And now this suite includes custom tags
similar to web controls in .NET framework.
Find out more here: http://www.servletsuite.com/jsp.htm
I currently use the Country tag and the State tag and they're awesome (simple, but still something I needed). One feature I'd like to see is XHTML compliance for these tags, so I send them an e-mail.
Any chance of making this (and statetag) XHTML
compliant? It would
basically involve allow assigning an "id" attribute
("style" would be
great too) and changing SELECTED to
selected="selected".
Lo and behold, I got a quick reply less than an hour later:
Hello Matt,
it will be done.
Best regards,
Coldbeans support
P.S. I would like to note that the wish list for any
component is open.
So, feel free to suggest new features/options etc. you
or your clients need and
we will add them to upcoming release. Your suggestions
for new components
are more than welcome also.
Sweet! Note the P.S. - send your suggestions if you have any.
One Hour Later: Both tags have been updated with new attributes, and it's now XHTML-compliant. ;-D
In the current project I'm on, one of the major requirements is to have the ability to send job postings to job boards such as Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, etc. - as well as local newspapers. When I first started this project, I went about contacting all of these advertisers and explained that we'd like to automate the process of talking to their system. I found that many of them preferred a simple e-mail with the job posting, but others wanted us to FTP a pre-formatted document to them.
I figure the easiest way to handle this is to use Velocity. By using Velocity, and storing templates in the database, users of the system can either (1) use a default template or (2) customize a template for a specific advertiser. This was all easy enough since we're using Struts Resume as a baseline for this project, and Velocity is already built-in.
I remembered seeing that Velocity had some sort of database ResourceLoader, so I went searching and found the DataSourceResourceLoader:
This loader will load resources from a DataSource such as a database. This loader is not built as part of the standard build as it requires J2EE support. To build this loader, please download the J2EE distribution, move the j2ee.jar into the build/lib directory, and then build the new velocity jar with the jar-j2ee build target. For more information on this loader, please see the javadoc for DataSourceResourceLoader.
After checking out Velocity 1.4.1 RC1 (are they ever going to release this thing?) from CVS, I was able to build a new Velocity JAR. To compile using J2EE 1.4, you have to modify the VelocityServletTest, or delete it. I then replaced velocity-1.4-rc1.jar with this new JAR (which is actually 4KB smaller), configured velocity.properties and Voila - it worked! Clean and easy integration - just the way I like it.
