Dan North

The vast majority of Java enterprise applications are architected along the lines of Sun's original PetStore showcase application. Rather than seeing this as a market stall displaying all the J2EE goods on offer, developers took it as a blueprint for enterprise applications. It certainly created a lot of work for Java application developers (as well as systems administrators and systems integrators), but whether most of the applications needed most of the possible layers - including bean-managed persistence and the ubiquitous DAO - is open for question at the very least. This article briefly describes some of the testability shortcomings of the traditional J2EE model and presents some alternatives. The J2EE Model With J2EE we are tied to a single logical server in a clie... (more)

Test-Driven Development Is Not About Testing

I am always on the look out for good questions to ask candidates in an interview. Not the "How many oranges can I fit in this room?" kind of nonsense (the stock response to which is apparently "with or without us standing in it?"). Nor the picky, encyclopedic type such as "In the javax.obscure.DustyCorner class, which method throws a FullyDocumentedException?" (If you do not respond with... (more)

Writing Testable Systems

Complex enterprise applications are generally hard to maintain, and risky and difficult to change. As a new developer on a team, a large legacy code base is often difficult to understand, especially when the code has evolved over a long period and new functionality has been grafted onto an existing application. The situation is exacerbated by the usual time and delivery pressures of comm... (more)