Kev's Development Toolbox

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.

I’ve long wondered about this but suffered along with everyone else anyway… isn’t Norton AntiVirus slowing down my PC?

I’ve noticed it more recently when I’ve downloaded some software and I’m unzipping a large zip file that in itself contains either large files or more large zips, copying files between network drives, or deploying WAR or JAR files to JBoss – it seems like when Norton kicks in to scan these files it adds a few extra seconds to the task, which should only take subsecond anyway.

CNet.com have an interesting article addressing exactly this fact, and better still, they recommend an alternative, PC-cillin Internet Security 2005, which is less of a resource hog. I just might have to take a look….

The Committee involved in the development of the JDO2.0 spec (JSR243) voted no against the latest revised spec. Major concerns voiced by the parties involved (Intel, Iona, HP, JBoss, Oracle, SAP, Fujitsu, IBM, BEA, Notel) were consistent in that they are worried that the Java persistence approach will become fragmented if JDO2.0 is allowed to continue, and should concentrate on a migration path towards the upcoming EJB3.0 spec, which is gaining significantly more backing and approval than JDO.

Although Sun voted yes on the spec, their recently published letter to the community requests developers to pull together and adopt a common persistence approach, favoring the upcoming EJB3.0 spec. The letter describes JDO2.0 as being no more that a maintainence release for JDO, not a further development. This letter was quoted in a couple of the ‘no’ votes.

Parties who voted yes on the spec included Sun, Apple, Doug Lee and Apache Foundation.