What's New?

Hibernate in Action (Book Review, Aug-21-2006)

Christian Bauer and Gavin King are members of the core Hibernate team - Gavin is the founder and principal developer, Christian maintains Hibernate's documentation and website. This makes the book they've written a great starting point for in-depth exploration of Hibernate's features. With it you get the perspective of those who conceived it and created it.

JUnit in Action (Book Review, Aug-02-2006)

Okay, so this book is a couple of years old and it was written before JUnit 4.x was released. However, I find the discussion of how to approach unit-testing of non-trivial applications (such as those dependant on JEE container or on database services) to be still conceptually relevant today. Despite the many examples the book is easy to read and the amount of detail is not overwhelming.

Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse (Book Review, Jul-23-2006)

Back in the year 2000 the author of this book wrote an article for JavaWorld.com called "Do You Really Need Enterprise Java Beans?". Five years later as the EJB 3.0 re-write is taking place Java is perceived by many as being heavy and it stands to lose popularity to alternatives such as LAMP, Ruby on Rails, and .NET. Anil's book goes a long way to reversing this trend by demonstrating a combination of technologies promising to bring simplicity back to Java and showing us how to use them to build an application complete with enterprise features...

A Groovy Script (Jul-14-2006)

Groovy is an agile scripting language with a syntax that is Java-like but far less formal than Java's own making it concise, more powerfully expressive, hence groovy. What's more, Groovy integrates with existing Java libraries and compiles straight to Java bytecode making it indinstinguishable and interchangeable with any Java code...

Test-Driven Development (Book Review) (Jun-14-2006)

Reviews for two books on the subject of test-driven development: "Test-Driven Development - A Practical Guide" by David Astels and "Test-Driven Development By Example" by Kent Beck...

Testing with Mock Objects (Jun-7-2006)

When you write JUnit tests you can run them as often as you like to because they run fast to give you the "green light" confidence. However, once you've written and maintained JUnit tests for real-world applications you quickly realize classes and methods under test call on other classes and methods, which maybe hard to set up or take time to execute. Enter mock objects...

Applying AspectJ to an Existing Codebase (May-15-2006)

AspectJ comes as a standalone toolkit including the AspectJ compiler and a runtime jar that is required to execute AOP programs. AJDT is the AspectJ plugin for Eclipse. It builds on the standalone toolkit providing further support for AOP inside Eclipse through specialized editors and views. As an Eclipse user my first inclination was to try AJDT to get the benefits of an IDE I am used to...