Reading Associative Arrays with ExtJS Models

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Wow, it’s been a while since I posted something…

I’ve been working a lot with ExtJs recently, as the basis for a web application which talks to a lot of JSON-based web services. And I got to say that I am enjoying it – it’s a nice, powerful framework that makes working with JavaScript quite bearable.

ExtJs includes a sub-framework for turning JSON (or XML) data into ‘models’, including nested data. It does this by providing ‘reader‘ classes that understand JSON (or XML). However, it only understands nested arrays. Sometimes what you have is a nested object – e.g. when you serialize a HashMap from Java into JSON. Fortunately, it’s possible to extend ExtJS and provide a new Reader – one that understands nested objects (aka ‘maps’, or ‘hashes’, or ‘associative arrays’).

If you’re using ExtJS, I hope you find this useful.

Code samples not enough anymore

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It’s becoming quite common for employers to ask to see code samples from prospective developers. This doesn’t really go far enough.

The next step up is to see the VCS history as well. A small sample – say, a couple of hours of work – can reveal a lot about how a person works – more than the code itself. Do they write tests first, or do they backfill later? Do they refactor their code to promote readability? Do they commit regularly, with meaningful comments, or do they just push bits in randomly?

With good free VCS hosting – like GitHub and BitBucket – anyone can easily create sample code and put it online for your potential employer to see.

So the next time an employer asks for a code sample, take it up a notch and give them the entire history as well. (And yes, I practice what I preach)

AiL – JBehave and Spring

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Having succeeded in getting a simple JBehave story running. my next challenge is to scale it up a bit. In particular, I want to get a JBehave story that integrates with Spring to do something more fully-featured: save an entry in a database.

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Thoughts on the new Podcast app for iOS

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Inspired by reading this article over at ZeroDistraction.com

While I don’t actually care about many of the features the author cares about (e.g. I prefer to do podcast discovery on my laptop), I do agree that the app feels clunky.

Update: Podcasts listened to using this app don’t get recognised as ‘played’ back in iTunes. Presumably that will get fixed with an iTunes update with iOS 6, but still… that’s the nail in the coffin for me. I won’t be using this app again until iOS6 is out proper.

Update the second: Heck, even after I manually updated the played status in iTunes, the Podcast app didn’t swap out the played episodes for unplayed. It did bring down new podcasts – but not new episodes.

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AiL – Simplest JBehave Scenario

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In the last segment, I managed to get JBehave reporting under Maven using a pre-canned example. This time, I want to tackle the other extreme – I want to develop a single story in JBehave and see what’s the bare minimum it takes to get it running, inside an IDE (in my case, Eclipse)/

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