Do you remember the good old Java Petstore ? It was a sample application created by Sun for its Java BluePrints program. The Java Petstore was designed to illustrate how J2EE (and then Java EE) could be used to develop an eCommerce web application. Yes, the point of the Petstore is to sell pets online. The Petstore had a huge […]
I'm fed up with unit testing !
It's 2012 and my first resolution of the year is to finally tell the truth about testing : unit testing is pretty much useless when your code runs inside a container. How do you unit test an EJB which relies on the container services (i.e transaction, injection, security...) ? Well, you mock the database access, you mock your security layer, you mock your dependencies, you mock your validation layer... to test what ? A bit of business logic. Yes. Unit test is interesting when you have complex business logic to test so you can have quick feedback. Otherwise, it's a waste of time which doesn't test your container services. So I'm not saying unit testing is completely useless, I'm saying that integration testing is also to be considered when you run your code inside a Java EE container.
Nearly two years ago (time flies), when Java EE 6 came out, I wrote a post about application servers where I did some micro benchmarking (basically, startup time). I had plenty of comments and recently I had many people asking for some updates. Witht Java EE 6 booming, with some cloud vendors moving to Java EE 6, it was time to update this microbenchmark and focus on Java EE 6 application servers. BTW, if you want to know what Java EE 6 is, you can check the slides of a presentationI gave a few times.
Same disclaimer as last time : This is not a real benchmark ! so I'll copy paste the paragraph I wrote last time :
In this test I’m just concerned about the usability of an application server for a developer. The idea is to download it, install it, start it and take some measurements : size of download, ease of installation, size of disk, startup time, size of RAM.
I've been asked so many times "what are the implementations of such or such specification in Java EE 6 ?" or "what is the reference implementation of such a spec ?". Because I always forget some (and to be honest, sometimes I don't even know if a spec has several implementations of not), I'm writing this post to help me (and you) to remember.
So here is a non-exhaustive list of the several Java EE 6 implementations (please leave a comment to add anything to this list) ...
In my previous post I've shown you how to bootstrap CDI in several environments (GlassFish, Tomcat, Jetty, Java SE). So now let's go a bit further and use it in real code. As its name states, CDI (Contexts and Dependency Injection) is also about Dependency Injection, so let's focus on just this feature for now. I will not define what DI (Dependency Injection) is. If you don't know I'll leave you to check the definition, the origins of this pattern and even a book that covers it all.
I feel like writing some posts about CDI (Contexts and Dependency Injection). So this is the first one of a series of x posts (0<x<10). I will not go through the entire history of CDI (formerly called Web Beans, splitted in two JSRs... and so on), but will try to give you information on how to use it in different environments, explain you injection, context management, scoping, decorators and so on. So you can think of this series of posts as a humble step by step CDI tutorial. You can also read the very good documentation on the JBoss website (where I got some help and inspiration).
It's been a long time since I haven't blogged about what I am doing on evenings and week-ends. For people who think that I watch TV and have BBQs on Saturdays, I have to tell you that I don't have any TV (it's been over 20 years now) and I don't have a garden to cook my burgers. No, I've spent my spare time updating my Java EE 6 book.
In this second edition I have updated the content and added new sections. When the first version of the book got out it was in June 2009 and Java EE 6 hadn't been released yet (December 2009). So there were some topics that I didn't cover because they were not completely finished (like the Criteria API in JPA 2.0). I've also updated the frameworks (GlassFish 3.0.1) and the code so it's more accurate. The book is planned to be published in September 2010. As always there is a full list of people I need to thank for this second edition. Writing or updating a book is hard work and comfort is always needed.
