A Java geek

Vaadin is available in version 6.6 preview since this week. Among other interesting enhancements, one surely caught my attention, the new Filter API. To understand why it’s so interesting, one must know how it’s handled in version 6.5 and before. But first, a word about filters in Vaadin: they are used in containers, which handle collections of items, in order to sort out eligible items.

The basis of this article is a sequences of tweets betwen me and M. Robert Martin, on April 8th 2011: If you have 100% coverage you don’t know if your system works, but you do know that every line you wrote does what you thought it should.@unclebobmartin 100% code coverage doesn’t achieve anything, save making you safer while nothing could be further from the truth.@nicolas_frankel 100% code coverage isn’t an achievement, it’s a minimum requirement.

Ten years ago, the only tests we knew of were users acceptance tests. The last decade saw a gigantic leap forward: it brought unit testing. Unit testing was made popular with JUnit. In turn, TestNG added annotations to the test classes, making them ever easier. Then, EasyMock provided the means to mock our class dependencies in a test context while Mockito streamlined the process of doing so.

Vaadin is a Rich Internet Application framework in Java that let developers code applications in a very productive way. For more information regarding Vaadin, please consult its site. When one wants to learn a framework, one needs to read some documentation. In this regard, Vaadin provides plenty resources:

Identity federation is a hot subject at this moment, at least for my customer. It began innocently enough: someone who did not belong to the organization needed to access an application. Not a problem, let’s register him. Some year later, needs number in thousands of users, and the identity management has outgrown its capacities: the software was sized for the organization, not for the myriad of third-party users around it.

Last week, Simon Brandhof and Freddy Mallet of Sonar team and me were discussing Vaadin uses. At the end of our meeting, and although Vaadin finally did not fit their particular needs regarding Sonar, the talk disgressed toward quality. As regular Sonar users know, the former includes a very interesting plugin aptly named Technical Debt plugin. As a reminder: Shipping first time code is like going into debt.

I’m a happy Dropbox user but that doesn’t mean I’m not watching similar products, either for myself or my clients. I even made some comparison.

Amazing thing this week! Imagine this case: developers need to access production application servers logs. These are inaccessible for now because application servers machines are production level. So they are placed in a different network zone. Between the AS zone and the DEV zone, there’s a firewall configured to disallow access from developers machines.