I just found what might be the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is so smart, so ingenious, that it made me excited like a child on Christmas for a whole week.
When running an optional Ant task through the Eclipse Ant interface, you get an error saying a dependent class could not be loaded. However, you have found all required dependencies for the tasks you are trying to use and put them in one of the folders as specified. This might be the solution.
Test-Driven Development has gone from being a new idea, considered slightly crazy, to a serious development style used by many professional developers in their everyday life. However, it is a style of development which requires much discipline, or you will not realize it’s potential. In fact, you might end up doing more harm than good.
We want a collection field belonging to an entity object to be sorted. There are two possible solutions.
Sometimes a constructor doesn’t communicate intention very effectively. This could be because instantiating the class in question isn’t as straight-forward as “creating a new object”, or because there are many alternative constructors. In those circumstances it might be useful to use well-named static or non-static methods to create instances of the class instead.
I want to describe a situation I came across where designing for testability seems to be in conflict with the always-valuable principle of loose coupling.
Again, the book Test-Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck provides me with an eye-opening experience. It explains how test-driven development is useful for scope control when developing.
I’m constantly trying to become better at estimating how long a development task will take. As one step in this process I decided to create a simple web-based timer which I could use to measure time. Shouldn’t be too hard, I just needed a simple stop watch — the simplest thing that that could possibly work. That’s what I thought at least.
While evolving a design is good and nice one has to remember that even though big design up front might not be a good idea, all the hard design work still needs to be done at some point. Otherwise you’ll just end up with a big piece of garbage. Therefore, while starting with a story, do take time and think it through and answer a couple of the following questions for yourself.
The thought popped up into my mind a while ago, that there is actually a striking similarity between refactoring and performance optimization.