Category: Development

Front end development info

After a while of developing back-end applications I’m back at doing some front-end work. In relation to this I did some resource and found a few sites that are worth visiting: 

https://www.digitoegankelijk.nl/

This site is developed by the Dutch government and aims to provide web developers information about creating quality websites.

https://quirksmode.org/

Contains tons of JS and CSS information and examples

How to run a demo Wicket application in two minutes

Inspired by the enthousiastic reports of other people I decided to have better look at Wicket, the upcoming MVC framework. 
Wicket is great for separation of code and gui. A web page is made out of a class and an html page, no need for jsp’s! For more information have a look at the site: http://wicket.sourceforge.net/Features.html 
I decided that the best way to get my first Wicket experience was to install the Maven archetype project. And well, after a few minutes I was looking at the first Wicket page that was served from within my own Eclipse IDE!


If you have Maven 2 and Eclipse installed, all you need to do is: 
1. go to the command line 
2. type: mvn archetype:generate 
3. choose the wicket archetype (at this time, it is nr. 36) 
4. fill in the options (choose ‘wicket’ as artefactid) 
5. change to the ‘wicket’ directory that now has been created 
6. create an eclipse project file by typing ‘mvn eclipse:eclipse’ 
7. start Eclipse 
8. import the Wicket project by selecting ‘import existing project’ and the ‘wicket’ directory as source 
9. run the ‘Start’ class as a Java app 
10. type in the url http://localhost:8080/wicket/ and there you go! 
The start class is not really part of the Wicket application, all it does is start an embedded Jetty server that runs the demo app.

Test your tests by having a tool break your code!

A fun way of testing your code is having a tool called Jester break it and then run your tests to check if there are failures. If no failures occur then there is a big chance that your tests are not completely covering your code. Another way to check your test coverage is Clover, but that’s far less fun.


IBM has an article about Jester: Test your tests with Jester 
And here you find Jester its homepage: Jester, the JUnit tester

Singleton, hingleton, mingleton and fingleton

Some new words arrived in Java town, taken from the Google singleton detector user guide: 
Hingleton Derived from “helper singleton,” a class which turns another class into a singleton by enforcing that class’s singularity. 
Mingleton Derived from “method singleton” a class which has any static method that returns some state without taking any parameters. 
Fingleton Derived from “field singleton,” a class which contains a public static field.

Code auditing tools

This is a list of popular code testing tools. Most of them are free and can be plugged-in to your development and/or build tool. 
PMD (free) 
The abbreviation PMD does not mean anything but the tool helps scan for problems in your sources, like bugs, dead code, suboptimal code, overcomplicated expressions and duplicate code. 
Checkstyle (free) 
Checkstyle is a development tool to help programmers write Java code that adheres to a coding standard. It automates the process of checking Java code to spare humans of this boring (but important) task. This makes it ideal for projects that want to enforce a coding standard. 
Dependometer (free) 
Java-based analysis tool for Java projects. Calculates metrics described by authors like Robert C. Martin, Craig Larman and John Lakos. Analyzes dependencies and detects cycles. Verifies the logical architecture against the physical implementation. 
Findbugs (free) 
A program which uses static analysis to look for bugs in Java code. 
Simian (commercial) 
Duplicate code checker.