Splitting up Spring Web Flow & Facelets into JARs

In our current project we want to have multiple Spring Web Flow-flows in one WAR-file. But we also want the flows and pages to be inside seperate JAR files, making the application a bit more managable and modulair.

This sounds straightforward but it took quite a bit of code and time…

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Cleaner code: Inversion of logic

Design patterns

Almost all programmers have heard about and used design patterns. And there are a lot of them. Famous design patterns include the Singleton, Observer, Template method. These are all patterns that focus on objects and the relationship between them.

There are more groups of patterns, for example take Dependency Injection (or Inversion of Control). This is an architectural pattern. They tell you things about the design of the whole program. And there are specific pattern groups, like concurrency patterns.

These patterns help you solve common problems in a well defined way, other programmers will recognise the patterns used and it will help produce more maintainable code.

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Java EE 6 released, including Servlet 3.0

Today marks the release of Java EE 6. The reference implementation (Glassfish V3) has been released and the specifications are going into their final state very soon.

About two years ago, while I was attending the JavaOne conference, I first heard about the Servlet 3.0 ideas. As a web developer I’ve worked a lot with these Servlets so I was curious about the ideas. But what I saw wasn’t what I hoped for. On the contrary, what I saw was a huge mistake in my opinion!
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Steve Oakley, the head hunter

Every once in a while head hunters call me. They call you at home, at work, they work out your email adress and mail you… This will probably sound very familiar to most IT professionals.

Anyway, the thing that strikes me is that about 50% of the time a head hunter calls, its Steve Oakley! And it isn’t just me that is getting calls from Steve Oakley, no, all my collegues and friends are getting calls from him as well!

So, are you in or out? Have you been called by Steve Oakley yet?

Testing with Spring

To improve the quality of your code it is important to thoroughly test your code. Not only using unit tests but also using integration tests. I’ll describe these terms and show examples on how to create tests using JUnit and Spring’s Test library.

Unit Testing

A unit-test is an automated test that tests one single unit-of-work. So, what is this unit-of-work? Its the smallest piece of code that can be distinguished. If you are programming in Java the smallest unit you can test is a single method. So all unit-tests should only test this single unit, and no other dependencies.

Here is an example of a unit-test:

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