Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

xUnit frameworks - they aren’t just for unit testing

I’ve had a discussion at my current client a few times where someone looks at a Junit test and says “this isn’t a unit test, whats the deal”. The answer usually is “yea, its a functional/integration/etc test - Junit is not just for unit testing”. Completely isolated, theoretically pure unit tests are great [...]

Using ajax for user monitoring, testing, and usability

I’m liking Eric’s idea on using Ajax for monitoring user actions for automatic error logging/capturing. Basically he is turning the tables on the common misconception that ajax can be used for evil “user spying” by instead using ajax to log all the users actions throughout the page for testing. He’ll be able to [...]

Book Review: Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

a review of Michael Feathers book on getting code under test

IDE code smell: generated comment templates in repository

Many of the modern automated IDEs insert boilerplate comments into your code as your create new classes, methods, code blocks, etc. They contain something like the following:
/*
* Created on Aug 15, 2005
*
* @author Insert Name Here
* Insert type description here
*
* To change the template for this generated [...]

Obie on Rails

thoughtworker obie describes his experience with Rails

attending Java in Action conference in Orlando

Attending the Server Side’s conference in Orlando this October

99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, in Java, multithreaded

This is pretty much the most important java program ever.
http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-java-3.html
The site has the 99 bottles program implemented in over 700 languages. A worthy goal:
http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/

The new(er) Rails movie is very impressive

I finally got around to watching the second Rails movie this morning. It really is very impressive as David blasts through a web blog application from zero to very functional in 15 minutes. No xml, no class path issues, and only one server restart - even with db schema changes. If [...]

Java technical interview guide - part 1

update 8/31/05: I have written part two with some possible answers. Also, renamed the post.
I did a technical evaluation for a candidate my employer was looking at awhile ago, so I had an opportunity to try and figure out a good set of technical questions for a prospective intermediate level Java web developer. [...]

Web testing and validation

There has to be a tool or script out there that can do the following, given the root of your web app:

validate XHTML according to the doctype
validate CSS
validate Javascript syntax
check all links to ensure they return an OK status code (recursively if desired)

I know there are plenty of ways to do each of these steps [...]