The Kaptain on … stuff

TestNG is a great tool for testing in Java, and it works even better with a little Groovy thrown in. Just lately I’ve had a lot of success using the DataProvider pattern. A DataProvider method in TestNG can return either a two dimensional Object array or an Iterator over each of the test parameters. A […]

Been having an awful lot of fun lately playing with the Groovy StreamingMarkupBuilder. I’m not a big fan of xml in general, but it’s definitely got its uses(configuration and web service data interchange to name just a couple). StreamingMarkBuilder makes it really very painless to create complex xml structures without a whole lot of hassle. […]

I had occasion today to reflect on what I’ve learned in the last few years developing software and it occured to me, not much has really changed since I first struggled with Lisp and Scheme in university. I still don’t completely “get” functional programming! Wrapping my head around all those brackets in any derivative of […]

I’ve been asked by my friend and co-worker Manfred Moser to give a presentation at next month’s Vancouver Island Java user’s group meeting, and silly me I said yes before remembering that speaking in front of people always makes me feel quesy and light-headed. Thanks Manfred for the kind invitation; I’ll do my best to […]

I’ve been learning a lot about Apache Camel at work recently and am so very glad that I signed up for the mailing list a couple of weeks back. Was scratching my head recently about why my headers were mysteriously disappearing from some messages and fortunately I read the mailing list before deep diving into […]

Over the last year I’ve done a lot of work with JBoss Seam, and while it’s not Grails it’s also not that bad for a web framework. Facelets is the view technology of choice, and it’s certainly better than many alternatives, but at the heart it is still xml and all those brackets make me […]