A Java geek

Should tests be ordered or not?

Most of our day-to-day job is learned through mentorship and experience and not based upon scientific research. Once a dogma has permeated a significant minority of practitioners, it becomes very hard to challenge it. Yet, in this post, I’ll attempt to not only challenge that sometimes tests must be ordered but prove that in different use-cases.

Java

Are you guilty of over-engineering?

If you listen to other language communities - such as Python or Ruby, it seems Java developers have a strong tendency of over-engineering. Perhaps they’re just jealous of our superior platform (wink), perhaps there is some very slight reason that they believe so. I do believe so. And it’s quite interesting that I realized it by doing code review - while I may be guilty of over-engineering myself when writing code. But I’m working on it.

Java

Adventures in SEO with Vaadin

TL;DR: Vaadin was hardly SEO-friendly in the past. Not anymore, with the new Volga library. Bookmarking pages Bookmarking is as old as www itself. Being able to save an URL is part of the ADN of websites. Regarding web apps, this is somewhat different. For example, in an e-commerce webapp, while it does make sense to bookmark a specific product, bookmarking a specific step of the checkout process does not.

Development

Limits of the technical debt analogy

The triangle of project management is a well-known model, used through and through since ages. I assume most software developers, even junior ones, are familiar with those: TimeCostScope As for my personal experience in the software industry, all projects have been behind schedule, with only a few exceptions for small projects (some man-months).

Development

Scala vs Kotlin: inline and infix

This is the 3rd post in the Scala vs. Kotlin focus series. This week, I’d like to address two features: inline and infix - not because they’re related but because neither of them would be enough to fill a post. Inlining comes from C (and then C++). In those languages, a hint could be provided to the compiler through the inline keyword. By doing so, it may replace an inlined function call by the function body itself in order to skip the overhead of a function call.

JavaEE

Starting with Cucumber for end-to-end testing

This week, my team decided to create a smoke test harness around our web app to avoid the most stupid regressions. I was not in favor of that, because of my prior experience with the fragility of end-to-end testing. But since we don’t have enough testers on our team, that was the only sane thing to do.

Java

Performance cost of reflection

In Java, it’s widely admitted that reflection - usage of the java.reflect API, comes at a high cost in terms of performance. Older Java versions had huge performance overhead, while it seems that newer versions bring it in the acceptable range. But what does 'acceptable' really mean? This is the question I asked when commenting on a performance review that advised to replace code based on reflection by standard code.

Development

You don't talk about refactoring club

The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. I guess the same could be said about refactoring. That would first requires to define what I mean by refactoring in the context of this post.

Development

Scala vs Kotlin: Operator overloading

This is the 2nd post in the Scala vs. Kotlin focus series. Last week, I started my comparison of Scala and Kotlin with the Pimp my library pattern. In the second part of this serie, I’d like to address operator overloading.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog