act:ualise | technology

As a long time user and advocate of Selenium I have found that using it on large projects ultimately consumes a lot of time with the following concerns:

Organising tests into logical groups
Executing testcases against multiple target browsers
Parallel execution of testcases

The motivation for these is to speed development; as the number of tests grow you eventually hit [...]

I recently figured out how to use WebTest for functional testing of Grails controller actions that render JSON. That said, I’m not convinced it’s the best way – I’m fairly sure the gFunc plugin would do it nicely, though I ran into problems with it clean compiling the whole app on every run.
Custom steps
It’s been [...]

Two recently released books I’m working through are Grails In Action and Unlocking Android, both published by Manning.
Notwithstanding the unusual covers, these are very handy, intermediate level books for their respective focuses which I’ve found useful for reference and learning.
Reviews for these books are plenty (GIA, UA) saving me the trouble, though it’s worth mentioning [...]

The hype that surrounded Wolfram Alpha bore similarities to the Segway hype machine of 7 years ago: not for the first time was the media abuzz with promises of a revolution in some small part of our lives, that hackneyed ‘paradigm shift’; the ‘game changer’.
Some weeks later, the news that their traffic levels have plummeted [...]

The No Fluff, Just Stuff 2009 Tour rolls into Seattle on September 18-20th. The line-up has some interesting speakers:

Brian Goetz, Author of Java Concurrency in Practice
Brian Sletten, REST Expert
David Geary, Author of Graphic Java and co-author of Core JSF
Howard Lewis Ship, Creator of Tapestry and HiveMind
Ken Sipe, Technology Director, Perficient, Inc. (PRFT)
Mark Richards, SOA and [...]

I’m a daily user of Google Reader and find it very useful for helping me manage information. Despite having used it for a year, and maybe because it’s quite well made to start with, I hadn’t stopped to ponder whether or not it had keyboard shortcuts until I accidentally pressed ‘g’ then ‘f’ in a [...]

Grails comes with HSQLDB as it’s in-memory db and it’s not difficult to inspect it, but there’s a simpler way than many realise and it’s built into every Grails installation, bundled in the HSQLDB jar lib.
I have found this trick is useful when inspecting DB state during integration test execution.
Just add the following line of [...]