Stephen Connolly stephenc

There has been this idea running around the back of my head for a while, and it’s only now that it is starting to crystalize into something that I can express.

When we look at Open Source projects, we see that there is a hierarchy of involvement. There are different levels at which you can be involved, and at each higher level, there will be less and less individuals. For now I am going to divide involvement up like this:

In relation to http://dhanji.github.com/#unit-tests-false-idol here is the tail of the worst test case I ever came across…

In a former employers, there was an employee who we will call Kevin McCallister in order to protect the guilty. In any case, for various reasons, I ended up having to maintain some of the code that Kevin wrote…

I ran all the test cases and measured the code coverage, it seemed high and there were lots of test cases… but bugs a plenty kept on hitting me… I finally found the answer in one test class… which looked a little something like this:

This is a tail about Jenkins (née Hudson) and Kohsuke’s policy of maintaining backwards compatibility…

Back in 2006 I started working for my previous employer, just a month or two after Peter Reilly started. Initially we were working on the same team. This was a team who’s CI system was a nightly cron job that emailed off a list of failing tests to everyone… obviously Peter and I had many a WTF over that old system… so I convinced our boss that we should put some effort into setting up a proper CI system… Initially this was CruiseControl (as he thought Hudson at version 1.64 was too new and unheard of… go with the old reliable)… but after a couple of pains with the CruiseControl system (monolithic xml config file), we convinced him to switch to Hudson… (I don’t think we ever looked back!)

In my previous post I showed how easy it is to run your java application on CloudBees’ RUN@cloud service. Today I’m going to use the CloudBees Deployer plugin for Jenkins that allows you to deploy your app to the cloud from your CI server. I am using the DEV@cloud Jenkins service for my CI infrastructure, but you can use this plugin from your own Jenkins (or Nectar) server.

So first step is to install the CloudBees Deployer plugin…

I work for CloudBees Inc., they are a great company with great products. I have mostly been working on the DEV@ side of the fence which is focused on continuous integration and basically the development side of your application, but we also have the RUN@ side of the fence where we provide a platform as a service (PaaS) for running your java web applications on the cloud. I could give you the sales pitch, but I’ll leave it at: the technologies and people behind RUN@ were one of the key reasons why I decided to join CloudBees.

The following quick and dirty bash script will take a pom and a jar and fake a maven build based on the source files for that that can be found in the current directory.

Really useful when running mvn dependency:analyze on a project you are validating POMs for.

#!/bin/bash

if [ "A$3" == "A" ]
then
    echo "Syntax: $0 pomfile jarfile dir"
    return
fi

rm -rvf "$3/src"
mkdir -p "$3/src/main/java"
cp -f "$1" "$3/pom.xml"
for name in $(jar -tf "$2" | sed -n -e "/\\$/d;s/\\.class/.java/p")
do
    echo -n "Looking for $name ... "
    loc="$(find . | fgrep $name | head -n 1)"
    if [ "A$loc" == "A" ]
    then
        echo "NOT FOUND"
    else
        echo "$loc"
        mkdir -p "$3/src/main/java/$(dirname $name)"
        cp "$loc" "$3/src/main/java/$name"
    fi
done

OK, so a while back I posted my bash script for selecting the maven version to use for the current session http://s.apache.org/FQ2

Now that I have a Mac for my full time development machine, I thought I would share my version of these functions for Mac users:

usemvn ()
{
    if [ -z "$1" -o ! -x "/usr/share/java/maven-$1/bin/mvn" ]
    then
        local prefix="Syntax: usemvn "
        for i in /usr/share/java/maven-*
        do
            if [ -x "$i/bin/mvn" ]; then
                echo -n "$prefix$(basename $i | sed 's/^maven-//')"
                prefix=" | "
            fi
        done
        echo ""
    else
        if [ -z "$MAVEN_HOME" ]
        then
            export PATH=/usr/share/java/maven-$1/bin:$PATH
        else
            export PATH=$(echo $PATH|sed -e "s:$MAVEN_HOME/bin:/usr/share/java/maven-$1/bin:g")
        fi
        export MAVEN_HOME=/usr/share/java/maven-$1
    fi
}

useant ()
{
    if [ -z "$1" -o ! -x "/usr/share/java/ant-$1/bin/ant" ]
    then
        local prefix="Syntax: useant "
        for i in /usr/share/java/ant-*
        do
            if [ -x "$i/bin/ant" ]; then
                echo -n "$prefix$(basename $i | sed 's/^ant-//')"
                prefix=" | "
            fi
        done
        echo ""
    else
        if [ -z "$ANT_HOME" ]
        then
            export PATH=/usr/share/java/ant-$1/bin:$PATH
        else
            export PATH=$(echo $PATH|sed -e "s:$ANT_HOME/bin:/usr/share/java/ant-$1/bin:g")
        fi
        export ANT_HOME=/usr/share/java/ant-$1
    fi
}

Simply add the above into your ~/.bash_profile and you can use them from any bash shell.

Here’s a handy string for i18n testing:

用户汉语

It can be handy to have a string in a non-english charater set that can be pushed end-to-end.

This should be a sad sad joke similar to the writing on the bottom of a leprechaun I saw in a gift shop in Ennis:

Déanta i dtír eile

I should point out that it was probably

Déanta sa tSín

Still

Mura féidir leat tuiscint a fháil ar an ansin is féidir leat léamh na Gaeilge.

An interesting blog on QA and development: The Clean Coder: QA or When do you flip a pancake?