NetBeans: Ruby Developer's New Best Friend Part 1 and Part 2 by by Roman Strobl
you will discover various ways that NetBeans can make a Ruby developer's life easier and some of the features that are not available in other IDEs. We'll also cover the background of the Ruby tooling project and provide necessary information about how to get the bits, configure the IDE, and the possible ways of contributing to the project.
Watir and Selenium by Bret Pettichord
Two excellent open-source tools for testing web applications are under development: Watir and Selenium. I?ve been contributing to both. Why? Wouldn?t it be better to just have one good tool?
Both tools run tests directly in a browser, and both do it in a way that allows the browser to be minimized while the tests are running, which means you don?t have to dedicate a machine to running tests. And both have been used to test significant web applications under development. But there are also many differences which ultimately stem from the different goals they were originally designed to meet.
Getting Started with EasyMock2 by Ralf Stuckert
Unit tests are no longer hype, but daily business. Developers love writing tests, and even do test-driven development. But testing units of code often is a problem: most parts of a software system do not work in isolation, but collaborate with other parts to get their jobs done. In unit testing, we do not want to test these collaborating objects, but only the unit under test. Mock objects provide a solution to this dilemma: they can be set up to behave as expected, so they are a perfect replacement for collaborators of the unit under test.
Technical Debt by Steve McConnell
The term "technical debt" was coined by Ward Cunningham to describe the obligation that a software organization incurs when it chooses a design or construction approach that's expedient in the short term but that increases complexity and is more costly in the long term
When do I refactor code? by Elizabeth Keogh
I don't refactor when…
…I spend five minutes on it and realise I'm not getting anywhere. I can always think about a more incremental approach and come back to it later.
Groovy or Ruby by Martin Fowler
Currently there's quite a debate raging over the relative merits of Groovy and JRuby as scripting languages running on the Java virtual machine. Curious minds want to know – which of these languages will win this upcoming language war? People want to know which language to pick for a project, or which language to commit to learn.
Spring Dynamic Language Support and a Groovy DSL by Dave Syer
Since the introduction of Spring dynamic laguage support in Spring 2.0 it has been an attractive integration point for Groovy, and Groovy provides a rich environment for defining Domain Specific Languages (DSL). But the examples of Groovy integration in the Spring reference manual are limited in scope and do not show the features in Spring that are targeted at DSL integration. In this article I show how to use those features and as an example we add bean definitions to an existing ApplicationContext with a Groovy DSL from the Grails distribution.
What's New in Spring 2.5: Part 1 by Mark Fisher
Since its inception the Spring Framework has consistently focused on the goal of simplifying enterprise application development while providing powerful, non-invasive solutions to complex problems. With the release of Spring 2.0 just over a year ago, these themes advanced to a new level. XML Schema support and custom namespaces reduce the amount of XML-based configuration. Developers using Java 5 or greater are able to take advantage of Spring libraries that exploit new language features such as generics and annotations. The close integration with AspectJ's expression language enables the non-invasive addition of behavior across well-defined groupings of Spring-managed objects.
