Category Archives: Technical

Eclipse versus IntelliJ Idea

Posted on April 14, 2005 by Todd Huss

The Java developer I hired to lead the Java side of our port from Perl to Java came from a background of using Idea rather than Eclipse. He liked it so much that we're going to be using Idea as … Continue reading →

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Consistency is more important than "correctness" or using the "best" software

Posted on April 9, 2005 by Todd Huss

When I started developing software professionally over a decade ago I would readily diverge from company standards at a whim to use a new language, style of coding, favorite editor/IDE, libraries, different build process, etc… Mainly because I wanted to … Continue reading →

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Fed up with Java, switching to a new language

Posted on April 1, 2005 by Todd Huss

I’ve had it with Java, too much technology to learn with Unit testing, ORM, IoC, AOP, and SOA, not to mention static typing and waiting to compile. That’s why as of right now I’m a converted .BAT programmer and here’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Java, Software Engineering | 21 Comments

Unit testing with coverage reports from within Eclipse

Posted on March 30, 2005 by Todd Huss

The ever verbose (if you've seen his blog) Pjammy pointed me to this nifty Eclipse plugin called djUnit. Just right click on a JUnit test, select run with djUnit, and it runs the JUnit test with instrumentation to produce a … Continue reading →

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Static typing increases productivity and reduces errors

Posted on March 23, 2005 by Todd Huss

I’m going to come right out and say that I have a strong preference for static typing in a programming language, especially as it applies to medium and large sized applications with multiple developers. Here’s why: 1. Refactoring: IDE’s make … Continue reading →

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Testing with mock objects

Posted on March 19, 2005 by Todd Huss

I put together a workshop for the team at work on unit testing and design with mock objects. I opted to show a small sample using both EasyMock and JMock. I'd used JMock before but EasyMock had some nice surprises … Continue reading →

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Java's verbose XML API

Posted on March 5, 2005 by Todd Huss

It feels like it takes me too many lines of code in Java to create a new XML document, transform it, and then validate the result. At every company I've worked at we've ended up with an XML utility class … Continue reading →

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Java XML data binding with Castor

Posted on March 5, 2005 by Todd Huss

In working on an XML data feed project at work I needed to generate the feed from our POJO domain model. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Castor XML made this task quite easy. The Marshalling framework will marshall … Continue reading →

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Persistence layer unit testing best practices

Posted on February 25, 2005 by Todd Huss

I've been doing some searching on best practices for unit testing the persistence layer with DBUnit and I'm interested in people's feedback on my policies or pointers to policies others have created. For example I've been thinking of making our … Continue reading →

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Building one big fat jar file

Posted on February 25, 2005 by Todd Huss

I've been working on software that generates a very large XML feed for customers. My plan was to have it run by a cron job and regenerate the feed once a week. I wanted my project to produce one file … Continue reading →

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