Kev's Development Toolbox

February 25, 2004

Blogs with funny names

I came across a link to this blog this morning from www.javablogs.com, and read an article listing ideas for development projects.

I though this was interesting as this is something that I also do on a regular basis – every time I have a ‘wouldn’t it be cool if I had an app that could do xyz’ I keep track of it in my PDA. Some ideas I get round to implementing, others I don’t, but it’s interesting to keep track of ideas like these.

Plus, the name of the guys blog was just so funny I had to link to it here: ‘BadMagicNumber’ (this probably doesn’t make any sense unless you have seen this exception yourself 😉

February 25, 2004

Sun to offer verification programme for certifying Java on Mobile Platforms

Since the introduction of ‘feature-light’ J2ME for mobile/small devices, Sun is becoming concerned that vendors are adding many proprietary extensions to the API and hence breaking the ‘write once, run anywhere’ promise.

Vendors have been adding additional APIs to add additional hardware support options – the problem is that code written to take advantage of these specific features will not run on a platform that does not have the additional features.

Sun is therefore going to start a ‘Verification Programme’ to certify core features on J2ME supporting devices to ensure a certain degree of standardization in Java supporting devices.

February 24, 2004

Unit Testing: Limit to 1 Assertion per test

In order to keep Unit Tests as simple as possible and easy to understand their intent, a good rule of thumb is to limit the number of assertions to 1 per test method.

This article by Dav Astelsdescribes this approach in more detail.

The main benefit from this approach is that each Unit Test method tests exactly one aspect of the system. If it fails then you (or someone else in the future who must debug the code) should know exactly the pupose of the method and therefore have a better idea of what has failed and where to start looking to resolve the issue.

February 24, 2004

J2EE Project Survival Guide – book chapter preview

TheServerSide.com currently have a chapters for review on their site of an upcoming book called “J2EE Project Survival Guide” which looks like it will be an interesting read.

This seems to be another book in the current trend of “horror stories from the trenches” genre, which are great for learning from others experiences.

Other notable books along the same lines are:

	Rod Johnson’s book – Expert One on One J2EE Design and Development. A good read – I am currently reading this right now. Covers some good background on typical J2EE development problems and alternative approaches, and guidelines for using J2EE technologies, such as EJBs.
	This is perhaps the classic “anti-pattern” book – what not to do and why. It’s safer to learn from other peoples problems, rather than fall into the same traps yourself…
	I haven’t read this one yet, but if it is as useful as Bitter Java, then this is worth a read too.