Frank: Automated Acceptance Tests for iPhone and iPad

Announcing Frank, a lightweight UI automation framework for iPhone and iPad applications.

[Click Here to watch the screencast in a more sensible size!]

Frank sews together several open source tools, notably UISpec, cocoahttpserver, and Cucumber. The goal is to automate basic UI-level acceptance testing of an iPhone or iPad application, integrated into a Continuous Integration system.

You can read more about Frank here.

Code Complexity Visualization for Ruby

Image from http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

WTF implies lack of clarity. Clear code is easier to understand, easier to maintain and easier to extend.

Announcing saikuro_treemap -- an easy to setup tool to generate complexity treemaps of ruby code.

See a demo for yourself.

Mockpico beta

Mockpico is an interesting tool. It leverages Mockito and PicoContainer to allow easy instantiation of Spring Controllers for unit testing. Often controllers have many dependencies injected into it via constructors, setters, fields. Sometimes these would be annotated with @Autowired, sometimes not (old fashioned XML composition). When in unit tests, you don't really want to have to specify every injectee as the particular request mapping you want to test might not use them all. With Constructor Injection you kinda have to specify them all of course, though 'null' might be an OK thing to specify.

Anyway, Mockpico makes it easier :- http://github.com/paul-hammant/mockpico (scroll down for colorful diagram)

It is pushed out as beta-1d as you can see here http://oss.sonatype.org/index.html#nexus-search;quick~mockpico. A Maven/gpg learning curve conspired to make this work on its fourth attempt (a thru d).

ProxyToys 1.0 released

Five or so years in development prior to the 1.0 moment, ProxyToys has finally shipped. Well it was perfectly usable in its 0.21 incarnation, but 1.0 makes ProxyToys fully JDK 5 compatible, and changes much more too:

• Use JDK 5 language features.
• Added builder classes for all toys (refer Martin Fowler's FluentInterface).
• New FutureToy to run methods asynchronously
• New PrivilegeToy to run methods as privileged actions.

In case you did not know, ProxyToys takes Java Classes/Interfaces and makes specialized implementations like NullObject, Pooled, Multicaster, Decorated. The project was first started by (now ex) ThoughtWorker Dan North, and pushed forward by many others since then.

PicoContainer 2.10 released

Perhaps the last version of PicoContainer 2.x before focussing on 3.x, 2.10 was released earlier today. Changes:

1. String converters can now be overridden, and added to.
2. There's a new type of method injection that matches on method name.
3. The first piece of JSR 330 compatibility has been ushered it - the @Named annotation is recognized.

Aside from those feature changes, bugs have been fixed in FactoryInjectors and Provided lifecycles.

- Paul

JBehave 2.4 released

JBehave continues to push forwards. This time with a 2.4 release, we have better output from scenario runs, new statistics gathering and reporting, and steps classes themselves can now optionally be POJOs (there had to extend a base class before). It is mostly non-ThoughtWorkers and ex-ThoughtWorkers steering JBehave now, but we still remain involved with each release contributing things that are important to us. See the release notes. Great work gang!

QDox and Paranamer releases

QDox's backlog of issues has been reduced by a decent percentage again by Robert Scholte and it has been released as version 1.10.1. Joe Walnes (who started the project) suggests that Robert becomes lead going forward. Codehaus encourages this sort of thing, and Robert has been defacto lead for much of last year. See the road-map for more information on where QDox is heading.

Paranamer 2.2 has been released too. It often follows QDox as one of the sub-modules uses it. This time though there's a new functionality too. There is a new implementation called AnnotationParanamer that can leverage the @Named annotation of JSR 330 for parameter name data. By nesting Paranamer implementations, you can allow @Named to override the natural parameter name of the method or constructor selectively. Paranamer has also dropped JDK 1.4 compatibility. Strictly speaking it could have remained mixed-mode 1.4 and 5.0 compatible, but by now only laggards are stuck on 1.4, and the old versions of Paranamer are still available. It is a very niche project, but does push the Java bar a little. Enjoy!