Tumble dried BDD from Studio Pragmatists

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Martin Harris

On the 18th of May, 2010, the very new tumbler-glass project by Studio Pragmatists uploaded Tumbler 0.2.1 to Maven. Having recently written about JBehave I found myself really liking the concept of behavior driven development. So I decided to write a similar article about Tumbler. If you want the project code its available in my example project.

4 hour time box in 20 minutes!

Once again I decided to time box the work to 4 hours. This time though the whole process only took about 20 minutes. The product owner and testers produce a story file. The Tumbler format allows for multiple stories each containing scenarios, so its possible to cover a complex set of requirements in one file. This allows for flexibility when breaking down the work into tasks. As per the usual behavior driven approach, a scenario contains the Given, When and Then sections which describe the behavior. Continue reading →

Bad or Good? Behavior Driven Development within Scrum.

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Martin Harris

I wanted to explore the possibility of using JBehave to formalise scrums definition of done. The idea being to encapsulate a definition of done as a JBehave scenario. So in true scrum style I decided to timebox 4 hours of work dedicated to JBehave.

From a scrum point of view BDD can be used to turn the definition of done into a test artifact. The team produces scenarios for each task. With JBehave a scenario file describes the required behavior and test steps it will need to pass to be considered done. I.e Given some prerequisites, perform some action and expect some results. See the JBehave project for more detail as this is only a simple example. Continue reading →

Untangling a Gigaspace Pojo

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Martin Harris

I am going to build myself another example application. I find these very handy for exploring ideas. If you already have a project with hibernate, spring, gigaspaces and such setup, your much more likely to try a few ideas out, and then blog them. So for a while this blog might be more quiet than usual. I think I may use Roo to do it. Roo looks like a great platform for quickly building something up for an experiment. i.e You can throw together a new set of entities, and then build an example on top of them. Before I begin, one last thing from my current experiments.

Sometimes JPA entity classes get hijacked.

Say for instance you have a need to pass entity classes to another system, via JAXB. Its possible to use DTO objects for the transfer or you could just annotate the the entity classes. In the example below, I wanted to fetch something from a database via JPA and write it into gigaspaces. It soon gets messy your Entity classes start to become a hub in the middle of your application with things dipping into some of the classes and annotating them and throwing them here and there.
Continue reading →

5 exciting things coming with Spring 3.0

Posted on November 19, 2009 by Martin Harris

In a previous blog entry I wrote about the now ancient announcement that spring 2.5 would be available. On the 2nd anniversary of that announcement I would like to examine the things I am looking forward to in Spring 3.0.

Release Announcement: 13/11/2009

5 cool things available in Spring 3.0

Java 5 fully used throughout the whole API. In 2.5 the core is still Java 1.4 compatible, 3.0 is written in and requires Java 5.0. This means much greater use of generics. Unrelated but they have also included many performance enhancements.
SpEL. Spring Expression Language gives access to nested bean definitions and system properties via #{…} syntax in property values. These dynamic #{…} expressions and static ${…} placeholders can also be used to inject property settings via the @Value annotation. This should much simplify property setting.
Comprehensive REST support. Spring 2.5 MVC is an excellent pattern. The simplicity of annotated controllers results in very clean implementations. 3.0 takes this system further by building in Restful support and a RestTemplate for clientside REST.
Spring 3.0 UI Field Formatting. Springs formatting system has always been useful in web and desktop applications. Its an effective way to remove a lot of boilerplate code from a system. This new system of annotations allows common formats to be applied to classes, model properties and methods. Check it out its very cool.
Many enhancements migrating to java.util.concurrent including ThreadPoolExecutorFactoryBean which exposes the native ExecutorService interface. The concurrent package is very good indeed, so bringing more support into spring is just fantastic.

Of the 5 mentioned here its only the tip of the iceberg as regards new features. This release is very rich. As usual with spring its when you have something to solve that you really appreciate it.

Transient Technology

Next time you look it might be gone

Tag Archives: annotation