Java for Testers

TLDR; Bonobo is a free and simple to install Git Server for windows.

The Bonobo git server install page instructions don’t fully match the process I had to use to install, so I’ve documented the process here.

TLDR; Coding Tips for beginners.Write your code as temporary comments, remove syntax errors as soon as you see them.

Here are a few tips I’ve been verbally passing on when teaching people on my Java For Testers face to face training.

TLDR; Rather than migration your assertions line by line, create an abstraction class to represent the new implementation and then perform inline refactoring.

I’m experimenting with migrating my projects to JUnit 5.

Many of the “how to migrate to JUnit 5” blog posts show differences, but not a lot of strategies. I used a Branch By Abstraction strategy to migrate JUnit 4 Assertions. This allowed me to experiment with using JUnit5 assertions or AssertJ assertions.

TLDR; Apply MVP principles when coding. Code to the API first. The API is internal before it is external. Unit tests with classes. In code testing with classes in combination. In code API testing. External HTTP API Testing. And then if necessary -In memory and process HTTP API testing. GUI.

A long time ago, in a town which I no longer live in, I wrote a tool called Compendium-TA

Commercially that was a disaster: it was self funded, it took a long time to write and I made some poor technology decisions.

I learned MVP and API First Thinking the hard way. I’ll try and explain within.

TLDR: Learn one programming language and you have already learned parts of other languages. You can speed up learning other languages by learning the differences.

I wrote a bunch of code in Java in my Test Tool Hub for generating CounterStrings.

I thought it would be useful to have it online and written in JavaScript.

TLDR: Spark is static so having it run in an @BeforeClass allows HTTP request testing to begin.

I use Spark as the embedded web server in my applications. I also run simple HTTP tests against this as part of my local maven build. And I start Spark within the JUnit tests themselves. In this post I’ll show how.

TLDR: refactored to isolate XML processing, configured XStream in code, removed all annotations, added XML header, wrote less code

I have a small REST API application which uses Spark and GSON and JAXB. I haven’t released this to Github yet but I did release some of the example externally executed []integration verification code](https://github.com/eviltester/automating-rest-api) for it.

When trying to package this for Java 1.9 I encountered the, now standard, missing JAXB, libraries. So I thought I’d investigate another XML library.

TLDR: Learn Java by taking advantage of code completion and JavaDoc in the IDE to explore classes with JUnit Tests

I my book Java For Testers I encourage the reader to experiment when learning Java by writing small JUnit tests to explore classes. I’m going to expand on that concept in this blog post and the associated video.

Resources are a very useful concept in Java. They are essentially files in the project which are compiled into the .jar

Java also has commands for finding them .getResource and reading them .getResourceAsStream

Very Handy.

But, they can be hard to wrap your head around. As evidenced by my own experiences trying to use them and the number of queries on stack overflow.

TL;DR Hack - add as a library in IntelliJ project. Tactic - add as system scope in maven. Tactic/Strategic - install locally to .m2. Strategic - use a repository management tool, publish to maven central

Sometimes you want to work with a jar file that isn’t hosted in maven central.

It might be a 3rd party jar, it might be one that you have written.

Regardless.

You have a lot of options for this. The approaches that I have used:

• add .jar files as an IntelliJ project dependency
• install it locally to your .m2 repository
• add it to your project as a system scoped file
• use a repository management tool: like Nexus or Archiva
• publish the dependency to maven central