Coming Up for Air

A Jersey POJOMapping Client/Server Example

JAX-RS is the specification that describes how to build RESTful interfaces in a Java EE environment. Jersey is the reference implementation of that spec, and, like many implementations, offers features above and beyond what spec does. One feature that I’ve been working with recently is the POJOMapping feature, which makes writing services and clients much easier, as well as typesafe. (more…)

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Grabbing Screenshots of Failed Selenium Tests

For the GlassFish Administration Console, we have quite a few tests (about 133 at last count). Given the nature and architecture of the application, we’ve chosen Selenium to drive our tests. One of the problems we’ve faced, though, is understanding why a test failed due to the length of time the tests take (roughly 1.5 hours to run the whole suite). Sometimes, we can look at the log and know exactly what failed, but not the why. Did the screen render correctly? Did, perhaps, the click, etc. not get performed (we’ve seen instances of that) leaving the application in a state not expected by the test? Since I usually start the tests and move on to something else, we had no way of knowing. Until now. I finally sat down and figured out how to grab a screen shot when a test fails. I’ve distilled that technique down to its essentials, which I’ll share here. (more…)

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Merry Christmas

I hope everyone who happens to find this site this Christmas season has a very special and blessed time with friends and family. On this geek blog, I think it appropriate to leave you all with a retelling of the Christmas story…through Facebook. God bless!

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Testing Android Applications with Maven, Android-x86 and VirtualBox

Cub TrackerFor a few months now, I’ve been working on a small application called Cub Tracker which is designed to help Cub Scout den and pack leaders track the progress of the scouts assigned them. I’m a big fan of testing, so I’ve done my best to follow TDD as I’ve worked on the app. Early on, it became clear that I needed a better way to test, as the official Android app is slow and unreliable at times. Via Twitter, I was turned on to Android-x86 and after a couple nights of hacking, I think I have a usable installation of Android-x86 under VirtualBox that has sped up my testing considerably. In this article, I’ll show you how I did it. (more…)

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Book Review: Real World Java EE Night Hacks – Dissecting the Business Tier

Last week, a great post by Adam Bien brought his latest book, Real World Java EE Night Hacks – Dissecting the Business Tier, to mind. I have since gotten myself a copy and thought I’d share my thoughts here. (more…)

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Funky Object Initialization

I’ve been using a technique a lot, recently, for initializing an object a bit more succinctly. It looks pretty odd, I’ll admit, enough so that it really caught a coworker of mine off guard. If you’ve been reading my recent REST posts, you’ve seen this a few times. I like it a lot, so I thought I’d a take a quick look at it. (more…)

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GlassFish REST Client: ComplexExample.java

In a series of recent posts, I’ve shown off what the GlassFish 4.0 REST client wrappers should look like, giving simple examples of using the wrappers using both Java and Python, the two currently supported languages. In this post, we’ll take a look at a more complex example, that of setting up clusters and standalone instances, deploying an app, then cleaning up after ourselves. Let’s jump right in. (more…)

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GlassFish REST Client Goes to the Flying Circus

It happened a bit more quickly than I had planned, and, yes, I know that’s a pretty bad Python joke, but, as promised, I just committed code to add support for generating Python REST clients to the GlassFish RESTful Administration interface. Let’s take a quick look at it. (more…)

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GlassFish REST Interface, a Client-side Perspective

As I’ve covered here before, GlassFish sports (and has for a while now), a pretty comprehensive set of management and monitoring REST endpoints. While this goes a long way toward opening up GlassFish management to various scripting solutions, the client side is still pretty manual. One my goals in GlassFish 4.0 is to fix that. In this article, I’m going to give you a sneak peak into what we on the REST team have planned for the GlassFish RESTful administration interface. (more…)

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A Quick (and oh so Brief) Look at a Windows 8 Developer Build

Call me crazy, but I tried Windows 8, albeit a developer build. An entry in my feed reader from TechBargains showed up announcing a free download of a Windows 8 developer build. It was free, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to check it out. After the 4G+ download, I was ready to create my VirtualBox Windows 8 VM, which I did this morning. It may not last long. (more…)

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