Are you pattern happy ?

i kept this secret deep inside of me for a long time. but now i can’t stand any longer and so it must come out: yes … i admit … i was pattern happy ;o)

it startet soon after post-graduation at my first job as a consultant for a big it company. at that time i was half-baked with little experiance with respect to the design of software systems. but that should change! i wanted to be a good designer – a master designer! and deep inside of me i was afraid. afraid of producing bad design proposals. afraid that one could blame me for poorly designed software systems. and so i grabbed for every support that could help. at that time design patterns were a very hot topic. it looked like they should be the ultimate solution to all of my problems since it seems that those patterns conserved the wisdom and experiance of all those great developers – experiance that i could’nt exhibit at that time

jFIT – a little brother for FIT

it’s common sense to test a single class inside of a unit test. you mostly hear about ‘class under test’ when talking about what to test and how to organize a unit test. have you ever wondered then why it’s called ‘unit’ test and not ‘class’ test? being pragmatic (well, of course we all are pragmatic and agile these days, aren’t we?), why not having a more coarse-grained unit than a class under test?

for example, you may have asked yourself more than one time, why not use JUnit for integration tests as well. having used FIT (Framework for Integrated Tests) as a very productive tool for such tests in the past, i wished to have a similar little brother for direct use within JUnit (let’s say for developer integration tests).
Especially when it comes to a wide range of combinations of input or setup data for the unit under test, an equivalent of FIT’s ColumFixture would be of great value.

ruby ruminations – singleton class

some call it singleton class, some metaclass or even eigenclass.
in this blog entry i will give some explanation about the concept of singleton class (which i will call it during this post) and some (more or less useful) examples of its application.

ruby ruminations – composing Procs

last week i had some time to play around with ruby again. in order to get deeper into it, i startet to study some foreign ruby code. amongst others, i found some very interesting libraries called ruby facets. having a look at some of their implementations caused some headache at first, but on the other side gave some motivation to understand what’s happening and why it’s happening in a certain way. risking a second look and having some ruminations about that code maybe gets me just a little step nearer to the white side of the force …

FIT – Framework for Integrated Test

a good friend of mine and i recently published a little series of articles about FIT, a simple yet powerful framework for integrated tests at JavaSPEKTRUM, a professional journal for software development in germany.

if you have read the articels you may want to study the full sources, which are mentioned and showed partly within.

i’ve provided the sources and classes under the following link for download.

feedback is of course always welcome!

enjoy!

ruby metaprogramming I

just played a little with some basic groundwork of ruby’s potentials upon metaprogramming. metaprogramming still is and even will become more important in regard to the increasing relevance due to domain specific languages (dsl). in the context of modeling such a dsl and expressing domain specific concepts within it, metaprogramming is a powerful and very flexible option, since it will provide the full power of ruby’s features when it comes to modeling domain concepts.