(Unit) Testing Swiss Knife: All the Tools You Wanted to Know

I love testing. And I like productivity. There are many tools and libraries that make writing tests easier, more convenient, more fun. I would like to introduce here those that I found the most useful during the years, from selected advanced features of JUnit to assertion libraries, powerful behavior/fault injection, testing of database-related code, and finally to boosting your testing productivity hundredfold with Groovy.

This post accompanies my JavaZone 2012 lightning talk and goes more in depth and introduces additional tools and tips.

Recommended Book: Real World Java EE Night Hacks by Adam Bien

Real World Java EE Night Hacks – Dissecting the Business Tier, Adam Bien, 2011, ISBN 9780557078325.

I highly recommend this very thin and down-to-the-earth-practical book to everybody interested in back-end Java (a basic knowledge of servlets, Java ORM, and REST might be useful). The book evolves around a small but realistic project (X-Ray), which we follow from the inception through couple of iterations til the end. Bien shows us how lean Java EE can be, how to profit from the functionality that it offers, and how these pieces of functionality fit together to deliver something useful. He actually introduces a complete Java EE development environment including continuous integration (CI), code quality analysis, functional and stress testing.

Some of the things that I appreciate most in the book is that we can follow author’s decision process with respect to implementation options (such as SOAP vs. REST vs. Hessian etc., a REST library vs. sockets, or when (not) to use asynchronous processing) and that we can see the evolution of the design from an initial  version that failed through cycles of growing and refactoring and eventually introducing new technologies and patterns (events, configuration over convention) to support new and increased requirements.

Creating Custom Login Modules In JBoss AS 7 (and Earlier)

JBoss AS 7 is neat but the documentation is still quite lacking (and error messages not as useful as they could be). This post summarizes how you can create your own JavaEE-compliant login module for authenticating users of your webapp deployed on JBoss AS. A working elementary username-password module provided.

Bad Code: Too Many Object Conversions Between Application Layers And How to Avoid Them

Have you ever worked with an application where you had to copy data from one object to another and another and so on before you actually could do something with it? Have you ever written code to convert data from XML to a DTO to a Business Object to a JDBC Statement? Again and again for each of the different data types being processed? Then you have encountered an all too common antipattern of many “enterprise” (read “overdesigned”) applications, which we could call The Endless Mapping Death March. Let’s look at an application suffering from this antipattern and how to rewrite it in a much nicer, leaner and easier to maintain form.

The application, The World of Thrilling Fashion (or WTF for short) collects and stores information about newly designed dresses and makes it available via a REST API. Every poor dress has to go through the following conversions before reaching a devoted fashion fan:

1. Parsing from XML into a XML-specific XDress object
2. Processing and conversion to an application-specific Dress object
3. Conversion to a MongoDB’s DBObject so that it can be stored in the DB (as JSON)
4. Conversion from the DBObject back to the Dress object
5. Conversion from Dress to a JSON string

Uff, that’s lot of work! Each of the conversions is coded manually and if we want to extend WTF to provide information also about trendy shoes, we will need to code all of them again. (Plus couple of methods in our MongoDAO, such as getAllShoes and storeShoes.) But we can do much better than that!

Exposing Functionality Over HTTP with Groovy and Ultra-Lightweight HTTP Servers

I needed a quick and simple way to enable some users to query a table and figured out that the easiest solution was to use an embedded, ligthweight HTTP server so that the users could type a URL in their browser and get the results. The question was, of course, which server is best for it. I’d like to summarize here the options I’ve discovered – including Gretty, Jetty, Restlet, Jersey and others – and their pros & cons together with complete examples for most of them. I’ve on purpose avoided various frameworks that might support this easily such as Grails because it didn’t feel really lightweight and I needed only a very simple, temporary application.

I used Groovy for its high productivity, especially regarding JDBC – with GSQL I needed only two lines to get the data from a DB in a user-friendly format.

My ideal solution would make it possible to start the server with support for HTTPS and authorization and declare handlers for URLs programatically, in a single file (Groovy script), in just few lines of code. (Very similar to the Gretty solution below + the security stuff.)

Groovy Grape: Troubleshooting Failed Download

If you use the Grape’s @Grab annotation to get dependencies for your Groovy scripts at runtime and their retrieval fails with the exception “General error during conversion: Error grabbing Grapes — [unresolved dependency: ...not found]” and a useless stack trace then you migth want to know that you can configure Ivy to log all the details of what is going on (what it is trying to download, where from, …), for example in the interactive groovysh shell:

groovy:000> org.apache.ivy.util.Message.setDefaultLogger(new org.apache.ivy.util.DefaultMessageLogger(org.apache.ivy.util.Message.MSG_DEBUG))
groovy:000> groovy.grape.Grape.grab(autoDownload: true, group: 'org.eclipse.jetty.orbit', module: 'javax.servlet', version: '3.0.0.v201112011016')
...
WARN: ==== ibiblio: tried
WARN:   http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/eclipse/jetty/orbit/javax.servlet/3.0.0.v201112011016/javax.servlet-3.0.0.v201112011016.orbi
...

You can likely also increase the log level by setting the system property ivy.message.logger.level to 4 (debug, see the Ivy Message class.)

(For the list of arguments that grab supports see GrapeIvy, namely the method createGrabRecord [btw, ext and type are ignored unless you also set classifier] this has been fixed)

Most interesting links of February ’12

Recommended Readings

• List of open source projects at Twitter including e.g. their scala_school – Lessons in the Fundamentals of Scala and effectivescala – Twitter’s Effective Scala Guide
• M. Fowler & P. Sadalage: Introduction into NoSQL and Polyglot Persistence (pdf, 11 slides) – what RDBMS offer and why it sometimes isn’t enough, what the different NoSQL incarnations offer, how and on which projects to mix and match them
• Two phase release planning – the best way to plan something somehow reliably is to just start doing it, i.e. just start the project with the objective of answering “Can this team produce a respectable implementation of that system by that date?” in as short time as possible (i.e. few weeks). Then: “Phase 2: At this point, there’s a commitment: a respectable product will be released on a particular date. Now those paying for the product have to accept a brute fact: they will not know, until close to that date, just what that product will look like (its feature list). What they do know is that it will be the best product this development team can produce by that date.” Final words: “My success selling this approach has been mixed. People really like the feeling of certainty, even if it’s based on nothing more than a grand collective pretending.”
• Tumblr Architecture – 15 Billion Page Views A Month And Harder To Scale Than Twitter – what SW (Scala, Finagle, heavily partitioned MySQL, …) and HW they use, the architecture (Firehose – event bus, cell design), lessons learned (incl. “MySQL (plus sharding) scales, apps don’t.”
• Jay Fields’ Thoughts: Compatible Opinions on Software – about teams and opinion conflicts – there are some areas where no opinion is really right (e.g. powerful language vs. powerful IDE) yet people may have very strong feeling about them. Be aware of what your opinions are and how strong they are – and compose teams so that they include more less people with compatible (not same!) opinions – because if you team people with strong opposing opinions, they’ll loose lot of productivity. Quotes: “I also believe that you can have two technically excellent people who have vastly different opinions on the most effective way to deliver software.” “I suggest that you do your best to avoid working with someone who has both an opposing view and is as inflexible as you are on the subject. The more central the subject is to the project, the more likely it is that productivity will be lost.”
• Jay Fields’ Thoughts: Lessons Learned while Introducing a New Programming Language (namely Clojure) – introducing a new language and winning the hearts of (sufficient subset of) the people is difficult and requires lot of extra effort. This is both an experience report and a pretty good guide for doing it.
• Jay Fields’ Thoughts: Life After Pair Programming – a proponent of pair-programming comes to the conclusion that in some contexts pairing may not be beneficial, i.e. the benefits of pair-programming don’t overweight the costs (for a small team, small software, …)
• The Why Monitoring Sucks (and what we’re doing about it) – the #monitoringsucks initiative- what tools there are, why they suck, what to do, new tools, what metrics to collect, blogs, …
  • Related: Getting started with the Sensu monitoring framework
• JBoss Byteman 2.0.0: Bytecode Manipulation, Testing, Fault Injection, Logging – a Java agent which helps testing, tracing, and monitoring code, code is injected based on simple scripts (rules) in the event-condition-action form (the conditions may use counters, timers etc.). Contrary to AOP, there is no need to create classes or compile code. “Byteman is also simpler to use and easier to change, especially for testing and ad hoc logging purposes.” “Byteman was invented primarily to support automation of tests for multi-threaded and multi-JVM Java applications using a technique called fault injection.” It was used e.g. to orchestrate the timing of activities performed by independent threads, for monitoring and statistics gathering, for application testing via fault injection. Contains a JUnit4 Runner for easily instrumenting the code under test, it can automatically load a rule before a test and unload it afterwards:

  @Test
  @BMRule(name="throw IOException at 1st call",
  targetClass = "TextLineProcessor",
  targetMethod = "processPipeline",
  action = "throw new java.io.IOException()")
  public void testErrorInPipeline() throws Exception { ... }

• How should code search work? – a thought-provoking article about how much better code completion could be if it profited more from patterns of usage in existing source codes – and how to achieve that. Intermediate results available in the Code Recommenders Eclipse plugin.

REST

• What Makes Jersey Interesting: Parameter Classes (by Coda Hale, 5/2009) – brief yet rich and very practical introduction into Jersey (the reference implementation of JAX-RS. i.e. REST, for Java) including error handling, parameter classes (automatic wrapping of primitive values). The following article, What Makes Jersey Interesting: Injection Providers, might be of interest too.
• How to GET a Cup of Coffee, 10/2008 – good introduction into creating applications based on REST, explained on an example of building REST workflow for the ordering process in Starbucks – a “self-describing state machine”. The advantage of this article is that it presents the whole REST workflow with GET, OPTIONS, POST, PUT and “advanced” features such as the use of If-Unmodified-Since/If-Match, Precondition Failed, Conflict. The workflow steps are connected via the Location header and a custom <next> link tag with rel and uri. Other keywords: etag, microformats, HATEOS (-> derive the next resource to access from the links in the previous one), Atom and AtomPub, caching (web trades latency for scaleability; if 1+s latency isn’t acceptable than web isn’t the right platform), URI templates (-> more coupling than links in responses), evolution (-> links from responses, new transitions), idempotency. “The Web is a robust framework for integrating systems at local, enterprise, and Internet scale.”

Links to Keep

Tools, Libraries etc.

• ClusterSSH – whatever commands you execute in the master SSH session are also execute in the slave sessions – useful if you often need to execute the same thing on multiple machines (requires Perl); to install on Mac: “brew install csshx”
• HTML5 Boilerplate (H5BP) – customizable initial HTML5 project template for a website; can be combined e.g. with Bootstrap, the HTML/JS/CSS toolkit (there is even a script to set them both up). Includes server configs for optimal performance, “delivers best practices, standard elements”.
• High performance libraries in Java – disruptor, Java Chronicle (ultra-fast in-memory db), Colt Matrix library (scientific computations), Javolution (RT Java), Trove collections for primitives, MG4J (free full-text search engine for large document collections), some serialization & other banchmarks links.
• Twitter Finagle – “library to implement asynchronous Remote Procedure Call (RPC) clients and servers. Finagle is flexible enough to support a variety of RPC styles, including request-response, streaming, and pipelining; for example, HTTP pipelining and Redis pipelining. It also makes it easy to work with stateful RPC styles; for example, RPCs that require authentication and those that support transactions.” Supports also failover/retry, service discovery, multiple protocol (e.g. http, thrift). Build on Netty, Java NIO. See the overview and architecture.
• Eclipse Code Recommenders – interesting plugin in incubation that tries to bring more more intelligent completion based more on context and the wisdom of the crowds (i.e. patterns of usage in existing source codes) to Eclipse

Clojure Corner

• Clojure/huh? – Clojure’s Governance and How It Got That Way – an interesting description how the development of Clojure and inclusion of new libraries is managed. “Rich is extremely conservative about adding features to the language, and he has impressed this view on Clojure/core for the purpose of screening tickets.” E.g. it took two years to get support for named arguments – but the result is a much better and cleaner way of doing it.
• Clojure Monads Series – comprehensive explanations of monads starting with Monads In Clojure

Quotes

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing-

 - Alan Perlis

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

Eric S. Raymond, “How to Become a Hacker”

Profiling Tomcat Webapp with VisualVM and NetBeans – Pitfalls

Profiling a webapp running on Tomcat with VisualVM or NetBeans wasn’t as easy as expected, so this is a brief record of what to avoid to succeed.

Environment: Mac OS X, Java JDK 1.6.0_29, Netbeans 7.1, VisualVM 1.3.3 (installed separately), Tomcat 6.

The Pitfalls:

VisualVM

• VisualVM Sampler and Profiler: To be able to drill down to the slow methods you need to take a snapshot before you stop the sampling/profiling (there is a [Snapshot] button above the Hot Spots list). This is not very intuitive and the interface doesn’t communicate it.
• VisualVM Profiler: Excludes Thread.sleep() & Object.wait() time (as opposed to the NetBeans profiler where you can choose to include/exclude them) => if you method is spending lot of time waiting for a lock, you won’t discover it
• You might need to allow unsafe, passwordless JMX connections in your Tomcat config, see Resources

NetBeans Profiler

• While VisualVM was able to dynamically connect to my Tomcat, NetBeans wasn’t able to do it and hasn’t provided any notification about the failure. The only visible manifestation was that it wasn’t showing and collecting any data. Solution: Use the “Direct” attach invocation, i.e. starting the target java application with the NetBeans profiling agentlib.

Tools Overview

VisualVM

Extremely useful tool, included in JDK since 6.0 (command line: jvisualvm) or on the VisualVM page.

• Automatically discovers local Java processes and can connect to them (if they run Java 6+)
• Monitoring – threads, heap, permgen, CPU, classes
• Sampler – low-overhead profiling tool (takes thread snapshot at regular intervals and compares their stack traces to find out where most time is spent)
• Plugins, such as MBeans, Tracers
• Profiler – a simpler version of NetBeans profiler (comparison here); it can dynamically attach to running (Java 6+) processes and instrument classes on-the-fly. The not very visible checkbox Settings in the right-top corner can be used to set the classes to start profiling from (syntax: my.package.** to include subpackages or my.package.* or my.pkg.MyClass) and the packages not to / only to profile (syntax differs here: my.package.* to include subpackages or my.package. or my.pkg.).

Resources

• Experience
• Profiling With VisualVM, Part 1 (6/2008) and Part 2, including comparison with the full NB profiler
• Profiling Tomcat with VisualVM on Mac OS X – including JMX setup in Tomcat

Release 0.9.9 of Static JSF EL Expression Validator with Annotated Beans Autodetection

I’ve released version 0.9.9 of Static JSF EL Expression Validator (tool to check that EL expressions in JSF pages use only existing beans and properties), available for download from Maven Central. The main addition since the last version is the ability to detect managed beans based on annotations instead of reading them from faces-confix.xml or Spring config, thanks to the cool Reflections lib, and support for ui:repeat.

Using Java Compiler Tree API to Extract Generics Types

I was looking for some way to extract information about types of elements in Java collections/maps using generics (List<String>, Map<String, MyBean>) so that the users of the Static JSF Expression Validator wouldn’t need to declare the type of the elements manually. One possible way to get this information is to process the source codes with the Sun Compiler Tree API, available since JDK 6.

It might be best to go and check the resulting 263 lines of CollectionGenericsTypeExctractor.java now. The code is little ugly, largely due to the API being ugly.