Posts Archive

"Yesterday we discovered a small but annoying performance bug: when getting a list of languages from the JVM we did not cache them but kept on retrieving them, which turned out to be quite slow. So, like the good guys we are we wanted to have a test that ensured that the error was not reintroduced. We looked at JUnitPerf which seemed to be appropriate - it decorates a unit test and times it."

"My brother just informed me that I’ve been getting a lot of adult referrers. I have to admit my naivite that I was not aware that it even existed. I will upgrade b2 so that I can blacklist these sites. I have absolutely nothing to do with them."

"I’ve got myself a SonyEricsson P900 which no doubt is the coolest gadget ever. I’m writing this sitting on the bus while at the same time listening to some ogg tunes. Awesome!"

"We have got our functional testsuite working. It currently consists of more than 260 tests doing everything from the simple login to running recorded WebDAV tests and restarting Websphere etc. We’ve done it in the way that Testing Extreme Programming prescribes, with collection of methods that are implemented both remotely and locally, running the servlets in-process. The methods are pretty high-level for a very high degree of usability. We’ve used HtmlUnit as the basis of our tests, extending it in the high-level methods."

"After a lot of work my shiny new IBM R40e is up and running with almost working ACPI, internal network adapter and a 3Com 54g wireless PCMCIA card, all on Gentoo Linux. A Mini HOWTO: Get an old PCMCIA card for the installation as the internal network adapter is not supported by the Live-CD I choose the Gentoo Stable kernel which is working great Do not enable PCMCIA in the kernel, emerge the pcmcia-cs package instead for continued setting up of the system."

"I got myself a new laptop the other day, a IBM T40e. It has a pretty good price performance with a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4M. While researching the laptop market it occured to me that most resellers still has not understoiod the difference between Centrino, Pentium 4M and Pentium 4. The vendor I choose happily listed the T40e as a P4 even though it in fact is a P4M. As a Gentoo fanatic I put the Live CD in an booted - no network."

"A few nice people commented on my posts on functional tests and suggested a few other alternatives: Canoo Webtest. It’s XML-based which makes it go right out my window. Sorry about that. We are a small company where programmers have to do their share of test time. This means that we are not afraid of code, in fact we prefer it. Jameleon. I had not seen this one, but looking at the tutorial it seems a lot more complex than the stuff we use now."

"After evaluating the previous named contenders for webtest tools, the winner was … none of them. It dawned upon us that the MaxQ way of doing this, ie. recording tests, really is not the way to go, ever. What you’re really doing is testing the server from a HTTP perspective, without testing button clicking and stuff. For example, all hidden fields must be specified at every request. If you have anything Javascript based you still have no clue if this works after having these funtional tests."

"Joe Walnes seems to be a really smart guy. He has released XStream, which to me seems like the only XML serializing library you will ever need."

"We are currently in the process of improving our functional testsuite, some might say getting one. I’ve skimmed the JUnit site and have found two alternatives: jWebUnit. It has a really clear and simple syntax which is why I prefer it over HtmlUnit which I prefer over HttpUnit. MaxQ. Recorded Jython scripts. I am not really sure what to make of it. The functional test suite must run separately from the rest of the system, which makes it a good candidate for a scripted language."