Stay on Target

Stories of Adopting Alternative JVM Languages in Java Projects in Better Software Magazine

Groovy, JRuby, Scala, and Clojure are some of the most widely used alternative Java Virtual Machine (JVM) languages today.  I spoke with several developers who adopted one of these languages in a Java-based project.  This article ("Alternative JVM Languages for Java Projects") tells their stories - which language they picked, why they picked it, and how they integrated it with their existing Java code base or infrastructure.

This article includes stories from the following people:

• Moss Collum: Gradually migrating code from Java to Groovy
• Kris Nuttycombe: Starting to use Scala to write tests for a Java project
• Najati Imam: Seamlessly deploying JRuby on Rails in an existing Java infrastructure
• Bob McWhirter: Combining some of the best parts of Java with Ruby language to build something new: TorqueBox
• Dan Chamberlain: Using Clojure to more naturally and succinctly model the business problem domain

 

Download PDF

 

This article appears in the September/October 2011 issue of Better Software Magazine.

Thanks to Heather Shanholtzer, Lee Copeland, Jean Middleton, and Cheryl Burke at Better Software Magazine for many things - the opportunity to write this article, top-notch editing, and valuable feedback.  Thanks to my friends Alex Baranosky, Moss Collum, Paul Infield-Harm, Joe Leo, Jason Reid and colleagues at Cyrus Innovation for their formative suggestions for the article.

Test-Driven Google Web Toolkit article in the GWT documentation

Sumit Chandel at Google has posted "Testing Methodologies Using Google Web Toolkit" in the official GWT documentation, an adaptation of my take on test-driven GWT.  You can find it in the articles section of the GWT project page. 

The example test code has been rewritten in EasyMock, which means you can now find an example in both JMock (in my original article) and EasyMock.

Thanks to Sumit for his feedback on the original article, and now for sharing it with the GWT community.

Test-First GWT article in November 2008 Better Software Magazine

Part two of my series on Google Web Toolkit, "Google Web Toolkit: Writing Ajax Applications Test First" (download article), is now in print in the November 2008 issue of Better Software magazine.  This article is a tutorial on applying Test Driven Development practices to build GWT applications.  It introduces GWT's testing support including GWTTestCase, describes the Model-View-Presenter design pattern, and includes test and production code samples.

Thanks again to my reviewers for their suggestions and feedback: Steve Berczuk, Paul Infield-Harm, Mushfeq Khan, Joe Leo, Michelle Osborne and Ariel Valentin.  Big thanks to Sumit Chandel of the GWT team for his technical feedback and editing and to Steve Freeman for his help with the JMock example.  Thanks to Lee Copeland, Chuck Allison, Heather Shanholtzer and the team at Better Software Magazine for the opportunity and excellent technical editing.

See the Sticky Notes online for infrastructure tips, GWTTestCase gotchas, and additional reference materials.

Part one of the series was published in the October 2008 issue.

Download PDF

Related posts:

• Strategies for testing GWT Widgets and View Components
• Testing JSON parsing using JavaScript Overlay Types in GWT 1.5

Ariel's new blog series on applying Ruby techniques in Java

My colleague Ariel at Cyrus Innovation has started a new series of blog posts entitled "How Ruby made me into a better Java developer".  In this series, he's going to be talking about he and his team applied many of the techniques from Ruby and Rails to a Java web application.

I've seen some of the changes the team has made and I was impressed; I especially liked the way they built action tests that could check the view (just like Rails functional tests).

I'm looking forward to reading the whole series!