Don’t make a mockery of testing

If you’ve worked on a Java team that valued test automation, you’ve probably been exposed to EasyMock or JMock.

While well intended, these tools imply that teams should focus their testing efforts on granular unit tests that provide maximum code coverage. Often these teams do this at the expense of integration tests. Since time is always finite, we suggest you spend the majority of your testing time on integration tests. Only after you’ve exhausted all integration testing possibilities should you be tempted to use mocks.

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FTP passive mode and Java Sockets

Okay, my first blog entry. Be gentle…

I just spent most of the day diagnosing this problem with an FTP server and a Java application, and I thought maybe I could save someone the effort some time. (more…)

Replacing gcj on Fedora

Due to licensing issues, Linux distros can’t distribute Sun’s JDK. Instead they use gcj, which in my experience is utterly broken. I just provisioned a new Fedora 7 VPS server today, and as part of getting tomcat and ant installed I needed to replace gcj with Sun’s JDK. Here’s the steps:
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Unit testing Flex

This is part 3 of my exploration into Flex. In part 1 I wrote a simple weather forecast application. In part 2 I refactored the non-UI code into separate ActionScript classes. In this part I discuss unit testing those classes using FlexUnit. In short, FlexUnit allows you to run unit tests from the command line.

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