Java Addicts

CruiseControl in Action

2005-01-25T20:18:00.000+01:00

Mike Clark, author of the great book "Pragmatic Project Automation" (if you don't have it, go get it!), has put up a nice movie showing CruiseControl in action. CruiseControl is a very nice tool for continuous integration. We use it at the company, where I work, and it has changed the way we deal with commits. Everyone tries to make sure that her code compiles and the JUnit tests run as expected. You can see within minutes, if the code base is still in a working state. It's insanely easy to set up, if you already have a working Ant or Maven build. If you don't know how CruiseControl works, just check the video and you'll get a nice introduction. Mike also put up a sample chapter of his book dealing with "Scheduled Builds", on the book's website. I wrote an additional publisher for CruiseControl to have the nice red or green icons of DamageControl. Quite nice and easy. Maybe I'll put it up within the next days.

Give your code a wash

2005-01-25T14:58:00.000+01:00

Since I was 'asked' to write in english here I'll do so ;-)
I was wondering if there would be a standardised way to do code reviews. After searching the web for a while I first found this funny Code Review Terminology. Oio wants to sell outsourcing capabilitys and do code reviews for money According to Wikipedia code reviews should take place in the "initial development phase" (when ever this is).
The only things I would need to be found during a review are: race conditions (in java also?), format string exploits, buffer overflows (or array out of bounds) and memory leaks. I'll check out some of the following tools which sounds promising: checkstyle, checklipse, Flawfinder and ...?
Beside this I'm waiting for helpfull comments.

AspectWerkz and AspectJ Join Forces

2005-01-20T09:31:00.000+01:00

Yes, it is happening! The two greatest AOP frameworks in the Java world merge forces to create, what will hopefully be the best AOP framework ever. I've been playing and working with AspectWerkz for quite some time now and have to say it's an amazing piece of software. The authors are very helpful and it's good to see the flexibility of AspectWerkz and the experience and tools of AspectJ go together. I can't wait to see and work with the first results of this collaboration.

TheServerSide has some information, and of course you can read about some more detailed development plans on the AspectJ website.

Look Ma, no Swing!

2005-01-19T21:19:00.000+01:00

I've been using Eclipse as an IDE for about one and a half years now. It's a quite amazing piece of software and what was kind of fascinating for me was the fact that those guys didn't care about Swing. Swing is something I could successfully avoid for the time I'm programming Java. Sure, there are things like JGoodies to ease the development, but somehow it just doesn't feel right, especially if you've programmed with stuff like Cocoa or the Qt (yeah, I like both C++ and Objective-C). Cocoa is one of most powerful and easiest frameworks I worked with. Qt is quite fascinating as well. They both have their upsides and downsides, but they stack up against Swing quite well.

About two weeks ago I decided to give programming with SWT/JFace a shot. And turns out, these fellas are an amazing couple. Programming with them reminded me of programming in Objective-C and Cocoa. You get to the point quite fast, if you know the way. I took a shot with two tutorials dealing with Eclipse RCP (the fancy word for an SWT/JFace application/plugin) published on developerWorks. The first one introduces RCP as a development platform and introduces the basic classes needed to get an empty application up and running. The second part gets down to business and shows you how to build a plugin to search Google with the Google API. Excellent stuff, so check them out here and here (developerWorks account required).

After digging through the tutorials I felt the itch to play around with more RCP stuff and implemented some small enhancements which I want to introduce here. If you want to try them out, you better go to the Google APIs website and get yourself an account. Without one of those, you won't be able to test the plugin (well, you could mock it, if you want ;).

The enhancements that I made, are pretty simple. It's basically a preference page and some contextual menu stuff. We'll start right away with the easier one, the contextual menus.

The picture shows the plugin you get after finishing the tutorials. The integrated browser is just amazing, isn't it?

Let's start off with some contextual menu stuff. The Google API returns some additional information with every search result found. The table view maybe isn't the right place to put that stuff into. We want to have it as an optional feature you might use, but don't have to. So we'll put it in a small message dialog and that's it. The code is quite simple. Maybe not the best way to implement it, but it's a start. It's basically just an addition to the class SearchView in the method createPartControl(). Did I say you should have done the two tutorials before going any further?


...

      // code from the tutorials (build the table viewer and the table)

      Table table = tableViewer.getTable();

      table.setHeaderVisible(true);

      table.setLinesVisible(true); 

      // now for the interesting part

      // context menu for the table

      // includes an item to display more information about a specific entry

      // and an additional item to open the link in the browser

      Menu tableMenu = new Menu(table);

      MenuItem item = new MenuItem(tableMenu, SWT.NONE);

      item.setText("More Information");

      item.addSelectionListener(new SelectionListener()

      {



         public void widgetSelected(SelectionEvent e)

         {

            // shows additional information of the selected item

            // in a simple message dialog

            MenuItem mItem = (MenuItem) e.widget;

            IStructuredSelection ss = (IStructuredSelection) tableViewer

                  .getSelection();

            GoogleSearchResultElement el = (GoogleSearchResultElement) ss

                  .getFirstElement();

            String msg = el.getSnippet();

            if (msg != null)

            {

               msg = msg.replaceAll("<[^>]+>", "");

            }

            MessageDialog.openInformation(table.getShell(),

                  "Additional Information", msg);

         }



         public void widgetDefaultSelected(SelectionEvent e)

         {

         }

      });



      item = new MenuItem(tableMenu, SWT.NONE);

      item.setText("Open in Browser");

      item.addSelectionListener(new SelectionListener()

      {

         // opens the entry's url in the browser view

         public void widgetSelected(SelectionEvent e)

         {

            MenuItem mItem = (MenuItem) e.widget;

            IStructuredSelection ss = (IStructuredSelection) tableViewer

                  .getSelection();



            GoogleSearchResultElement el = (GoogleSearchResultElement) ss

                  .getFirstElement();

            BrowserView.browser.setUrl(el.getURL());

         }



         public void widgetDefaultSelected(SelectionEvent e)

         {

         }

      });



      table.setMenu(tableMenu);



...

The first menu entry (named "More Information") basically just fetches the additional information from the selected search result entry and displays it in a message box (parsing out the HTML tags beforehand). The second actually does the same thing as a double click on a search result entry, it opens the entry's URL in the browser view.

So what's with the menu stuff? Basically you just go ahead, create a menu, add it to the table and add entries to it. SWT is the other way around, sort of. You create a menu (with class Menu, obviously) and set the table as its parent. Then you create as much menu entries as you want and set the freshly created menu as their parent. Kind of weird that way, but you get used to it. The menu items need a listener to handle the corresponding action, of course. They both do the same, basically. They fetch the selected search result entry from the table view and fetch either its additional information (it's called snippet) or its URL. It's that easy. So how does it look? It won't blind you, but check out the image to see the menu in action.

That's it for the night. Next time I'll show you how to implement a preference page. Not surprisingly, it's darn easy.

Nerd Test

2005-01-19T17:10:00.000+01:00

I took the nerd test today, and luckily, I came out as being lightly nerdy. What a relief ;). That's good news for sure. Click the image to check your nerd score.

{mark, damn!!}

Auch Computer sind Künstler

2005-01-18T18:34:00.000+01:00

So schön sieht die Ausgabe des KControlCenters aus wenn man versucht mit dem Eclipse Editor ein 35MB Logfile zu öffnen. Irgendwann erschien dann eine "OutOfMemory" Meldung und ich setzte dem Spaß ein Ende. Da gehen less, vi und Konsorten ganz anders zu Werke ...

Ich bin auf Entzug

2005-01-17T10:33:00.000+01:00

und zwar auf kaltem!! Ständig sitz ich vor dem Rechner gewillt meiner Passion nachzugehen, aber immer kommt etwas dazwischen.
Man kann es kaum fassen wieviel Zeit man mit Computerproblemen verbringen kann, die nicht einmal die eigenen sind :)

M.

Ja ich bin süchtig ...

2005-01-15T01:16:00.000+01:00

... java süchtig - schnief. Es vergeht nicht ein Tag an dem ich nicht eine Zeile schreiben muss. Manchmal reichen auch ein paar Versuche mit Eclipse oder log4j. Aber am besten kickt doch so ein richtiger import java.lang.util.*; // Gibt es da eine Therapie?

Ich hoffe nur ich verbreite hier nicht zu viel Lingo.
Außerdem: Warum bloggt denn hier eigentlich keiner?
Liegt es vielleicht an diesem furchtbaren WYSIWYG editor?

C.

Soooo

2005-01-13T22:07:00.000+01:00

Ein guter Tag zum .... bloggen?
Mal sehn wann die anderen Member mit einer Nachricht erscheinen. Heute hab ich mir mal LogFactor5 angesehen. Scheint ganz cool zu sein, gibt es aber fast nix auf der Apache Webseite. Hier mal ein Link zu etwas verstaubter Doku. Wird das Teil nicht mehr gepflegt oder was?

by CHK