Erlang for Java Developers

You probably haven't noticed, but it's a couple of weeks since I last posted a blog. There is reason for this is that I've ruptured my Soleus and my leg is in a plaster cast. Being immobile I thought that it would be a good idea to investigate something totally different - it was either that or watch day time TV and, even though reruns of Kojak and Magnum PI were tempting, investigating Erlang came out tops.

The thing to remember here is that this is not an Erlang tutorial, the idea here is to examine a few of the similarities between Erlang and Java in order to try an provide a starting point for learning Erlang. If I've made any howling mistakes, then hopefully someone with more Erlang experience will let me know.

When getting started, the first thing they tell you about Erlang is that it's a functional language; however, before you have apoplexy at the thought, it's such a well structured functional language that you'd think you were dealing with objects.

Getting Started With Spring’s MVC Test Framework - Part 2

The first blog in this mini-series introduced the Spring MVC Test Framework and demonstrated its use in unit testing Spring MVC Controller classes as controllers rather then as POJOs. It’s now time to talk about using the framework for integration testing.

By ‘integration testing’ I mean loading the Spring context into the test environment so that the controller can work with its collaborators in ‘end to end’ tests.

Getting Started With Spring’s MVC Test Framework - Part 1

Newly promoted to the main Spring framework is the Spring MVC Test Framework, which the Guys at Spring claim is a “first class JUnit support for testing client and server side Spring MVC code through a fluent API”¹. In this and my next blog, I’m going to take a look at Spring’s MVC Test Framework and apply it to some of my existing sample code to figure out whether or not it does what it says on the tin.

The API has been designed with two ways of setting up server side tests. These are firstly, with a Spring context file and secondly, programmatically without a context file. The Guys at Spring refer to the programatic method as ‘standalone’ mode.

Setting tests up programmatically

Auditing a Spring MVC Webapp with AspectJ. Part 2

Now, this is the blog you want to read if you're interested in creating a Spring MVC Webapp that uses Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) in the form of Aspectj's @Aspect and @Before annotations to audit a user's visit to a screen.

As I said in my last blog auditing a user’s visits to a screen is one of those few cross-cutting concerns that Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) solves very well. The idea in the case of my demo code, is that you add an annotation to the appropriate controllers and every time a user visits a page, then that visit is recorded. Using this technique you can construct a picture of the most popular screens and therefore the most popular chunks of functionality in your application. Knowing these details makes it easier to decide where to aim your development effort as it doesn’t pay to develop those chunks of your application that hardly anyone ever uses.

For the demo-code I created a simple Spring MVC application that has two screens: a home page and a help page. On top of this I’ve created a simple annotation: @Audit, which is used to mark a controller as one that needs auditing (not all of them will, especially if you choose to audit function points rather than individual screens) and to tell the advice object the screen id. This I've demonstrated in the snippet of code below: