Java « Kerry Buckley

2 January 2008

Java ‘Good for Nothing’?

Filed under: Java,Software — Kerry Buckley @ 5:03 pm

In Language Explorations, Ola Bini (of JRuby fame) suggests that there won’t be any more ‘big languages’, but instead more of a mix-and-match approach, with different languages used for different parts of an application according to their strengths, all running on the JVM (or presumably .NET if you’re on the dark side).

An interesting opinion (which I’ve slightly mischievously taken out of context here) from the article:

In fact, I’m not sure if Java the language is good enough for anything, anymore.

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8 November 2007

String#casecmp

Filed under: Java,Ruby — Kerry Buckley @ 1:31 pm

As far as I can tell, this is the correct way to do case-insensitive string comparison in Ruby:

if string1.casecmp(string2) == 0
  # strings match, ignoring case
end

That’s so ugly, it almost looks like Java. Actually, it’s worse than Java, which has String#equalsIgnoreCase.

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29 May 2007

An issue with mock-driven development in dynamically-typed languages

Filed under: Agile,Java,Ruby — Kerry Buckley @ 10:09 am

First, let me make it clear that I really like BDD, I really like mocks, and I really like dynamic languages. RSpec does a pretty good job of combining all three.

However, there’s one disadvantage that duck-typed languages suffer when it comes to using mocks to drive the design of the interfaces between objects.

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14 May 2007

Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails…

Filed under: Java,Rails — Kerry Buckley @ 5:02 pm

The guys over at Rails Envy have created an excellent J2EE vs Rails parody of Apple’s Get a Mac adverts:

Apparently there are more coming over the next few days.

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13 March 2007

cruisecontrol.rb

Filed under: Agile,Java,Rails,Ruby,Software — Kerry Buckley @ 7:13 pm

In case you missed it, those nice people at ThoughtWorks released CruiseControl.rb yesterday.

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18 February 2007

BTâ€™s Java SDK part two: making phone calls

Filed under: BT,Java,Web21C — Kerry Buckley @ 12:02 pm

Yesterday we saw how easy it is to send text messages using the SDK, so now let’s try making a phone call.

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17 February 2007

BT’s Java SDK

Filed under: BT,Java,Web21C — Kerry Buckley @ 5:01 pm

As I mentioned recently, I now work in the Web21C SDK team. The SDK provides a simple API for programmatically accessing various web services that BT provides, including SMS, conference calls and location services.

The SDK is in public beta, and is currently free (with daily usage limits). Up to now it’s only been available for those crazy .NET folks, but the next release (on Monday, all being well) will extend that to Java, PHP and Python. Rumour has it that Ruby’s in the works too.

I’ve been having a play with the Java version – here’s a sneak preview…

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9 January 2007

“Given when then” in JUnit

Filed under: Agile,Java — Kerry Buckley @ 12:18 pm

AS I mentioned at the end of this post, I’ve been convinced by Dan North’s case for using the “given when then” pattern for specifying scenarios during behaviour- or test-driven development, and while I wait for JBehave to be released, I’ve been playing around trying to come up with a way of using the pattern to clarify intent in (Java) unit/acceptance tests.

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21 December 2006

Testing java code using rspec and jruby

Filed under: Agile,Java,Ruby — Kerry Buckley @ 1:44 pm

Now that rspec runs under jruby, and with a few hours to spare, I thought I’d have a play.

[Update:] I’ve simplified the import of java.util.Date following a suggestion in a comment (from Charles Oliver Nutter, no less!). I also noticed that I wasn’t using rspec’s setup properly (or at all), so I’ve tweaked the samples a little. I haven’t got the code here to try out, so there may be typos.

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