Don't Panic!

Spring-WS and Security

Published on February 19, 2011

Spring Web Services (Spring-WS) are a neat way of declaratively creating SOAP web services using Spring with a minimum of boilerplate code usually associated with web services. I’d recommend it as the best way to create web services for a Spring application. When it comes to WS-Security (message encryption, authentication, signatures and so on) it is absolutely vital. It simplifies the very complicated business of securing messages to a few lines of declarative code.

I found the documentation provided by Spring on writing Spring-WS services and securing Spring-WS services very in depth and thorough but I’ve not yet found a good simple example app. This demo is about the simplest possible web service with the most standard WS-Security features enabled.

Test Coverage

Published on December 12, 2010

I’ve been looking a lot recently at JUnit (and TestNG) tests on a code base I’m not too familiar with. In many cases I was not convinced that the tests were adequate but it took a fair bit of investigation before I could be satisfied that this was the case. I would need to look at the tests, then look at the code it’s meant to exercise, then try to work out in my head if the test covers everything it should. To make this process a bit easier, I’ve started running code coverage analysis using Emma. While this doesn’t tell me if the test is good or not, it does show me at a glance how much code is covered by the test and exactly which lines, methods and classes are missed. This is usually a good first approximation for the quality of the test case.

I’ve found Emma to be a useful tool to run after I think I’ve written my test cases and got them working. Running the test case tells me if the code being tested works. Running Emma tells me if I’ve tested enough of the code. There’s no point in having 100% test case successes if the tests themselves only exercise 50% of the code.

DbUnit

Published on December 1, 2010

I’ve decided to revisit the JUnit testing Hibernate and Spring recipe that I posted a while back. A problem with the previous recipe is that it did not provide any means to initialize the test database. This wasn’t too much of a problem as I was mostly testing the data insert operations of the DAOs. I then used the same DAO to retrieve the newly inserted data and tested what came back. However this is no good if I don’t want insert operations on my DAO (if it’s to retrieve read only data from the database) or if I want to test the retrieval operations independently of the insert operations.

This post extends the recipe to include a means of initialising the database using DbUnit.

Bug Shooting screen capture

Published on November 10, 2010

Bug Shooting from http://www.bugshooting.com/

When it’s time to move on

Published on October 12, 2010

You’re a problem solver. You’re one of these people who will pick up a rope that’s gotten all tangled up and spend an entire day untangling it because it’s a challenge, because it defies your sense of order in the universe and because you can. – Sometimes I try to picture you sitting on a beach with absolutely nothing to do… The picture always ends with your head imploding.

— Delenn, Babylon 5 – Epiphanies

In an attempt to stop my head imploding, I’ve decided to leave my current job. I’ve spent the last three years solving some great problems and untangling a whole heap of stuff. Just recently I’ve begun to feel that I’ve gotten everything in order and there’s just nothing left to straighten out.

Tapestry Quickstart

Published on October 2, 2010

As preparation for a recent interview, I decided to attempt to download, install and run an example Tapestry web application. I set aside a couple of hours to get this going. I expected to have to download an installation bundle, extract it, run an installer, install some dependencies, install and configure a webserver, start some services, write some code, debug, swear a bit then give up and just read an online tutorial.

As it happens, all you need is Maven 2. Running two goals with no particular config will download Tapestry and all dependencies, build and deploy a sample webapp and then run it in a webserver (which it will install too!).

Spring-WS SAAJ problem in JBoss

Published on August 29, 2010

I recently used Spring-WS in an application that we wanted to deploy under JBoss 4.0.1sp1 / JDK 1.5 and JBoss 5.1.0GA / JDK 1.6. I had a good few problems getting the dependencies just right but the biggest problem was with SAAJ.

If you’re running JBoss 4.0.1sp1 and JDK 1.5, you’ll need to package a SAAJ implementation with your app. Easy enough. However, if you’re running JBoss 5.1.0GA and JDK1.6, you don’t want to include a SAAJ implementation as it’s included in the JDK 1.6 release. Also easy enough? Er no.

Maven 1 to Maven 2

Published on July 22, 2010

I’ve been using Maven 1 for close on to five years now. I’ve been meaning to upgrade to Maven 2 for pretty much all of that time but never quite got round to it. A combination of my starting work on a new project and finding some nasty bugs in Maven 1 has finally nudged me towards Maven 2.

Surprisingly, in my team of around a dozen developers, we’ve had only minimal exposure to Maven 2. Everyone has stuck loyally to the now completely obsolete and unsupported Maven 1. I think everyone hopes someone else will do the hard work first.

As we have dozens of build projects in our repo I can’t migrate them all at once. I’m just doing my project and its immediate dependencies. Unfortunately, this causes problems for the old Maven 1 projects as Maven 2 repos are not compatible with Maven 1. So during the transition period I must ensure that both old style Maven 1 projects and new style Maven 2 projects have access to their dependencies from one or other of the repos.

Resizing a virtual hard disk

Published on May 2, 2010

No matter what size hard disk you have, sooner or later you’ll find it’s too small. This is just as true for virtual hard disks as it is for physical ones. One of the benefits of virtialization is that you can change your ‘hardware’ setup on a whim. Want an extra gigabyte of memory? No problem, just assign it in your virtual machine config. So long as your host machine has capacity and the guest O/S supports it, this is easy to do.

Frustratingly though, none of the main VM software vendors (VMWare, Microsoft Virtual PC / Server and Sun VirtualBox) offer a way to resize a disk from the standard user interface. It is possible, but it takes a little fiddling to get it to work.