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Development Personal Web

Abstractions always leak

A quote of a quote in a InfoQ article on the release of GWT 1.5:

Key point: GWT gives you a lot of leverage, but it isn’t intended to be a “walled garden” in any way. Abstractions always leak, so it’s better to embrace that fact. We intentionally make it easy for you to punch through the abstractions and get down to the nuts and bolts JavaScript environment so that you can integrate with any other technology you like. That flexibility is a sort of insurance policy for both GWT itself and GWT users: you can be sure that you’ll be able to combine any client-side technology you want with GWT, and we (the GWT development team) don’t feel as if we have to explicitly provide integrations for an open-ended set of things, because you can always do it yourself without waiting on us. For an example of the kind of flexibility I’m talking about, check out Ray Cromwell’s Syndroid work.

This is a key aspect for good frameworks. Not only because abstractions leak, but also because sooner or later someone will discover a bug or a missing feature. Making it easy to fix or extend the framework for those special cases is essential for a good framework to live and to be adopted.

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Development Personal

Shorter turnaround with JavaRebel

All of us have felt the pain waiting for the web-container to reload after just a minor change to the code. Well, recently i came across JavaRebel from ZeroTurnaround and they seem have solved our problem! And if you, as most of us, enjoy Spring you’ll also enjoy their Spring plug-in to monitor your context-files.

As they put it:

JavaRebel is a developer tool that will reload changes to compiled Java classes on-the-fly saving the time that it takes to redeploy an application or perform a container restart. It is a generic solution that works for Java EE and Java standalone applications.!

Promise me to have a look at their screancasts (found on the right hand side of the page). They also have a nice list of features and supported JVM’s and web-containers.

They also have a Google group that answers questions you may have.

I haven’t tried it yet but am truely looking forward to it:-)
And if you do, please post a comment and let me know how it went.

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Personal

Swimlane testing at Eclipse

Found some really interesting stuff about automated testing with a tool they’ve dubbed Swim. It basically uses the tests as online documentation. By abstracting actions to the correct level, and supplying generated screenshots every step of the way, tests can be verified and used as documentation. Through Ole Mortens blog. Check out Jon Udells entry for an explanation.