A Java geek

My summary of JEEConf 2014

2014 saw my first participation in JEEConf (Kiev, Ukrain) as well as my farthest travel East so far. I’m so glad I could attend! As a speaker, I was not only shown Kiev during a guided tour, I also had the privilege to attend a true traditional Ukrainian banya (bath), complete with wet leaves, cold water and full head-to-toe scrubbing. I do not know if there’s a tradition of Ukrainian hospitality, but if there’s one, it was more than upheld!

Development

Dead simple API design for Dice Rolling

I wanted to create a small project where I could achieve results fairly quickly in technologies I never (or rarely) use. At the Mix-IT conference, I realized the few stuff I learned in Scala had been quickly forgotten. And I wanted wanted to give Gradle a try, despite my regular bitching about it.

Java

Playing with constructors

Immutability is a property I look after when designing most of my classes. Achieving immutability requires: A constructor initializing all attributesNo setter for those attributes However, this design prevents or makes testing more complex. In order to allow (or ease) testing, a public no-arg constructor is needed. Other use-cases requiring usage of a no-arg constructor include: De-serialization of serialized objectsSub-classing with no constructor invocation of parent classesetc.

Java

The Visitor design pattern

I guess many people know about the Visitor design pattern, described in the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software book. The pattern itself is not very complex as many design patterns go. I’ve known Visitor since ages, but I’ve never needed it… yet. Java handles polymorphism natively: the method call is based upon the runtime type of the calling object, not on its compile type.

Java

Introduction to Mutation Testing

Last week, I took some days off to attend Devoxx France 2014 3rd edition. As for oysters, the largest talks do not necessarily contain the prettiest pearls. During this year’s edition, my revelation came from a 15 minutes talk by my friend Alexandre Victoor, who introduced me to the wonders of Mutation Testing. Since I’m currently writing about Integration Testing, I’m very much interested in Testing flavors I don’t know about.

Miscellaneous

Can we put an end to this 'Estimate' game of fools?

When I was a young software programmer, I had to develop features with estimates given by more senior programmers. If more time was required for the task, I had to explain the reasons - and I’d better be convincing about that. After some years, I became the one who had to provide feature estimates, but this did no mean it was easier: if the development team took more time to develop, I had to justify it to my management.

Event

My recap of JavaLand

This week, I have been attending the first edition of JavaLand in Brühl, organized by Oracle User Groups of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Here’s quick recap of my experience there. The first thing that deserves special mention is that the event took place in a theme park. Picture this, an empty theme park (or more likely a part of it) only opened for specially privileged geeks (like me).

JavaEE

Vaadin and Spring integration through JavaConfig

When I wrote the first version of Learning Vaadin, I hinted at how to integrate Vaadin with the Spring framework. I only described the overall approach by providing a crude servlet that queried the Spring context to get the Application instance. At the time of Learning Vaadin 7, I was eager to work on add-ons the community provided in terms of Spring integration.

Development

Teaser for Cargo Culting and Memes in JavaLand

At the end of the month, I will be speaking at the JavaLand conference in a talk called 'Cargo Culting and Memes in JavaLand'. Without revealing too much about this talk, here is a teaser article that I hope will make you book a place at JavaLand if you have not done so at this point. Basically, Cargo Culting is a way to reproduce outer aspect, in order to gain some properties.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog