Author: kevin

Four years since he passed away in 2001, an asteroid has been named after Douglas Adams, the British author famous for his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy of books (in 5 parts).

The asteroid is named ‘Douglasadmans’. In 2001 just days after his death, another asteroid was named ‘Athur Dent’ after the main human character in the Hitchhiker books.

I’m always interested when someone claims to develop a working application with minimal amount of coding. This article on the O'Reilly OnLamp.com site shows how to build a webapp using Ruby with the Rails framework. When they say minimal lines of code they really mean it.

Take a look and see what you think. I haven’t used Ruby yet either, but this framework could be a good reason to start learning…

More info on Ruby here, and the home page for Ruby on Rails is here.

OnJava.com have an interesting article about using Easy Mock and Mocquer for using Mock Objects for Unit Testing.

Mock Objects are incredibly useful for Unit Testing in order to test a slice of your application in isolation from the rest of the application. Mock Objects behave as a facade to the rest of your real application but with stubbed out logic (or alternative logic for testing), so you can test an individual piece of code in isolation from other code.

EasyMock is a framework that automatically generates mock object proxies for you from interfaces (so you don’t have to write the mock object yourself by hand), and Mocquer takes this a step further and facilitates the generation against regular classes.

Sun’s Java Technology Fundamentals Newsletter from last week (1/11/05) covers a lot of ground, but has an interesting article on using Var Args, and also a link to an in depth article on using the JConsole JMX monitor to monitor an application running on a 1.5 VM.