Category: Software Development

Unnecessary dependencies are at least midly naughty

I really, really, shouldn’t bite, but… Cedric is asking about dependent test methods and if they are evil Well, they may not be evil, but they are at least mildly naughty.

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Failure is necessary to succeed

Steve brings up a quote that I’ve always liked: By definition, risk-takers often fail

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Reducing the size of Checkstyle logs

If you use Checkstyle, especially as part of an automated build you may notice that the size of the log file can be a bit big.
I did, anyway, so I wrote a stylesheet to trim it down to size.

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Coding Convention: Put identifying parameters first

When declaring a FactoryMethod put identifying parameters first.

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Another good use for named queries

A while back, I blogged about how Hibernate named queries rock I found another reason why they rock today: it lets you hide what your persistent properties are called.

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Would you blame the hammer because the nail is blunt?

Cedric’s having another go at JUnit Again he misses the point: extensions to JUnit are not JUnit itself, and JUnit can’t be blamed for people extending it to the wrong way.

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How do I find what tests use this method?

As I said earlier, I’ve been reading Michael Feathers _Working Effectively With Legacy Code_ recently (I’m taking my time with it; it’s a good book). He spends a lot of time talking about techniques to get code under test. However, he spends very little talking about finding out if (and to what extent) a method is under test in the first place. So here’s how I do it:

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Things that bug me about IntelliJ

For the last few years, I’ve been saying that IntelliJ is the best Java IDE on the market, but that Eclipse is pretty close. I’ve also been using Eclipse that whole time (having used IntelliJ before that), because my then-employer didn’t like to shell out money if they didn’t have to.

Well, I’m at a different company, and everyone here uses IntelliJ (bought-and-paid -for, even!). And I’m finding that IntelliJ is as good as I remember, but there are a lot of things that are bugging me with it. Enough that I wonder if it’s worth using.
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