In Java, java.io.File is one of the more frequently used low-level API objects. It also happens to be lacking in some basic functionality that we’ve all needed at some point, doesn’t provide different representations/API for files and directories and doesn’t throw fine-grained exceptions to differentiate between different types of error conditions (i.e., file already exists, … Read more
In my previous post on Object-Relational Mapping tools (ORMs), I discussed various issues that I’ve faced dealing with the common ORMs out there today, including Hibernate. This included issues related to generating a schema from POJOs, real-world performance and maintenance problems that crop up. Essentially, the conclusion is that ORMs get you most of the … Read more
If you need to schedule jobs in Java, it is fairly common in the industry to use Quartz directly or via Spring integration. Quartz’ home page at the time of writing claims that using quartz is a simple 3-step process: Download, add to app, execute jobs when you need to. For any of you that … Read more
Frequently developers rely on 3d party libraries to avoid reinventing the wheel, particularly in the Java world, with projects like Apache and Spring so prevalent. When dealing with these frameworks, we often have little or no control of the behaviour of their classes. This can sometimes lead to problems. For instance, if you want to … Read more
A problem that I’ve hit a few times in my career is that we sometimes want to allow self-signed certificates for development or testing purposes. A quick Google search shows the trouble that countless Java developers have run into over the years. Depending on the exact certificate issue, you may get an error like one … Read more
We discussed previously everything that didn’t make it into Java 7 and then reviewed the useful Fork/Join Framework that did make it in. Today’s post will take us through each of the Project Coin features – a collection of small language enhancements that aren’t groundbreaking, but are nonetheless useful for any developer able to use … Read more
Good functional testing is one of the most difficult tasks for web application developers and their teams. It is a challenge to develop tests that are cheap to maintain and yet provide good test coverage, which helps reduce QA costs and increase quality. Both Selenium and WebDriver (which is essentially now the successor to Selenium) … Read more
In a previous post, we discussed how to actually go about combining mockFor() and mockDomain() when it comes to unit test support for .withCriteria. If your code uses the Gorm.createCriteria(), you’ll likely want to switch to .withCriteria to make it unit testable. We promised to cover using HQL as well so let’s do that now. … Read more
Most Java developers these days deal with Spring on a regular basis and there are lots of us out there that have become familiar with its abilities as well as its limitations. I recently came across a problem that I hadn’t hit before: introducing the ability to rewire a bean’s internals based on configuration introduced … Read more
As we’ve mentioned before, anything you can do to make automated testing easier in your Grails project will help you achieve one of the primary goals of the platform – high productivity. Since you’ve chosen the Grails platform, you’re likely making good use of its features such as GORM, plugins, convention based spring wiring and … Read more