Java Thinking

A friend contacted me for advice. He was having trouble writing a test for some code. I asked him to send me the code and the test so I could see what was going on. I encounter this problem quite frequently, so I thought I'd post one of my responses... Okay, here is where I think you are going wrong, and when writing tests becomes hard, it’s usually because of this. It’s important to layer your applications. Web/Services/DB – at least conceptually. What you have is a class that does everything. Web and Service. No-one can reuse your file processing logic without using the web, not even tests! A nice way to code would be to: Write a UNIT test that attempts to process a file. It passes in a file X and asserts that the result is Y. It won’t compile because you haven’t written the file processing code yet! Now you write the service which processes the file The test will compile and run now, but probably fail because you forgot something. Now you can fix your service And ...

I don't know how it happened, but my local working copy got locked. This meant that every time I tried to commit, I got a 'working copy is locked' error. The solution was easy, after I found a reference in the FAQ : svn cleanup <directory>

I'm currently looking for contract work, and all of the usual places offer vague job descriptions that makes it hard to differentiate one from the other. This makes it hard to decide which ones to apply for, and almost always mean that you end up applying for jobs that are totally inappropriate. Now there is JobReel.com.au - much along the lines of jobs.joelonsoftware.com , positions must display the employer. I'm still looking for a site that lets me specify location, price range, responsibilities and technologies - but JobReel is closer than any of the others, and from what I've seen so far, the job descriptions are more useful and realistic. It looks relatively new to the scene - good luck!

There is a good article here about the need to explain why you are coding. I've often found that with most projects or tasks people are reluctant to give you the high level picture - it wastes too much time and, "you don't need to know". It reminded me of several situations where someone comes to me and says - "I want you to write a program that does this...". I say "sure", expecting that they have done the due diligence and arrived at the conclusion that this is the correct thing to do. (I've even had my knuckles wrapped several times for second-guessing these requests). So, you proceed with development and somewhere along the line (at the watercooler, elevator or kitchen) you mention what you are doing, and they hit you with "There's no need to do that because system XYZ is being replaced with ABC" or some other equally jaw-dropping statement. I like to know the bigger picture of where a piece of work fits in, because then I ca...