Posted by Maarten Winkels in the late afternoon: September 15th, 2011
In two previous posts, we have seen how to develop RESTful application with JBoss AS 7. At the end of the second blog we used a generic REST client tool to execute some RESTful web services. Of course we would rather build a custom UI application as client for our services, so that a user can easily access and manipulate the data. In this blog we build a REST client that is based on the master-detail principle.
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Posted by Age Mooij in the late afternoon: February 3rd, 2011
Trying to produce bad quality code is quite hard when you are using Test Driven Development (TDD), even when you are doing it wrong on purpose.
Recently Iwein and me were preparing some labs for a developer training and the plan was to create some really bad quality Java code as a starting point. Students would then be asked to clean it up and add some new features, all this of course with the intent to show the effect of bad code quality on your ability to quickly add new features. This was going to be a piece of cake!
After some brainstorming for interesting standalone programming challenges, we came up with the idea of writing a JSON to XML converter. It should be able to take any valid JSON string and convert it into a simple XML representation. Out of habit and without really considering the option of skipping this step, we started with a simple failing test. Here it is:
@Test
public void shouldConvertTopLevelEmptyArray() {
assertThat(converter.convert("[]"), is("<array></array>"));
}
Simple, right? To implement our converter we decided to use the well known “red, green, as little refactoring as possible” anti-pattern, which we expected to result in lots of copy-paste duplication, very long methods, and the other typical code smells we all know and loath. Our first implementation approach was to go for some all-time favorite candidates for producing bad code: string manipulation and regular expressions. As Jamie Zawinski famously said: “When some people have a problem, they think: ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions’. Then they have two problems.” We had created a sure thing recipe for disaster. It was going to be all downhill from here, or so we thought.
Posted by Gerbrand van Dieijen in the early morning: September 28th, 2010
Last Friday, one week ago, the Software Development Day was at Xebia, the first one for me as I started at Xebia this year. As written by Iwein there was some discussion about the use of Javascript started by yours truly. Should we do all UI related functionality in Javascript? Do we do throw away our knowledge, tools and best practices we know when we start coding Javascript? Why should we code in Javascript using the browser as some sort of Virtual Machine, if in fact we want to create desktop application?
Posted by Erik Pragt in the early morning: February 5th, 2009
When developing an AJAX application you often end up with some data interchange format, like XML, plain text, or, in my case: JSON. The trouble with JSON, however, it that’s it’s quite hard to read. Not because it’s so complicated, but because it has been optimized for network communication, which in this case, means: all the whitespace has been stripped. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an integrated JSON formatter in your IDE to handle this? Well, now it possible!