This article discusses dependency injection in a tutorial format. It covers some of the features of CDI such as type safe annotations configuration, alternatives and more.

Visual Studio has had hardware-assisted memory access breakpoints for quite some time now—they are called data breakpoints and, unfortunately, can be used only for unmanaged code. WinDbg has a similar feature with the ba command, which is more flexible because it can be configured to fire when a memory location is read, not just written. (Of course, WinDbg does not have the managed/unmanaged limitation either, but you still have to exercise caution because managed objects may move in memory every time a garbage collection occurs, which would require you to reconfigure the hardware breakpoints.) This type of breakpoint is implemented using hardware support from the CPU. On Intel platforms, the DR0-DR7 debug registers are used to enable hardware breakpoints on reading/writing memory locations. For example, to set a hardware breakpoint on reads and writes to four bytes at the address 0x01000100 you set DR0 to this address, and set bits 0, 16, 17, 18, 19 of DR7 to 1. This is a great feature, and its only limitation is that the area watched by the breakpoint is at most 4 bytes (on 32-bit processors) or 8 bytes (on 64-bit processors)*. In other words, if you have a large array that is being corrupted in a random location once in a while, you can’t figure out the source of the corruption using hardware breakpoints. What you could do, however, is the following trick**. Suppose for a moment that you large array resides precisely on page boundaries, e.g. an array of 4,096 integers that starts on a page boundary and ends after four pages (x86 pages are 4KB). Then what you could do is: Temporarily change the virtual memory protection of that page to PAGE_GUARD. Subsequent accesses (reads or writes) to that page will raise a special exception, a guard page violation. Your debugger could catch this exception, verify that it occurred on access to that special address, and notify you that a breakpoint occurred. When you want to continue execution, the debugger could allow the memory access to go through, set the PAGE_GUARD flag again, and proceed. Although this is fairly tedious (or impossible) to accomplish in Visual Studio, it sounds like a great task for a WinDbg extension which I might write one day. In the meantime, we can use the SDbgExt extension which exports the !vprotect command, wrapping the VirtualProtectEx Win32 API. Here’s a sample debugging scenario with that idea in mind. The program being debugged is the following: int* g_arr; int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]) { g_arr = new int[10000]; for (int i = 0; i < 10000; ++i) g_arr[i] = 0; getchar(); int n = rand() % 10000; g_arr[n] = n; printf("%d\n", g_arr[n]); return 0; } …and we are interested in stopping on the red line, which modifies a random location inside the array. Unfortunately, nothing guarantees that the array resides on page boundaries, so we might get PAGE_GUARD exceptions when something within the process attempts to access a memory location close to our array. This is something a real debugger extension would have to handle, too. 0:000> x *!g_arr 00d0715c myapp!g_arr = 0x00590068 0:000> .load c:\temp\sdbgext 0:000> !vprotect 0x00590068 0n10000 104 Protection changed (old protection 4). 0:000> g (1f54.1c0c): Guard page violation - code 80000001 (first chance) First chance exceptions are reported before any exception handling. This exception may be expected and handled. …snipped for brevity… myapp!wmain+0x9e: 00d0337e 891481 mov dword ptr [ecx+eax*4],edx ds:002b:0059010c=00000000 0:000> .exr -1 ExceptionAddress: 00d0337e (myapp!wmain+0x0000009e) ExceptionCode: 80000001 (Guard page violation) ExceptionFlags: 00000000 NumberParameters: 2 Parameter[0]: 00000001 Parameter[1]: 0059010c 0:000> ? (0059010c-0x00590068)/4 Evaluate expression: 41 = 00000029 0:000> dv n n = 41 0:000> gh …and the program terminates peacefully with the output “41”. If you would like to see something like that implemented as a debugger extension, feel free to do so and let me know, or write enough encouraging comments and I might just do it myself :-)

JSF and JavaScript can combine forces to develop powerful applications. For example, let's see how we can use JavaScript code with h:commandLink and h:commandButton to obtain a confirmation before getting into action. Getting ready We have developed this recipe with NetBeans 6.8, JSF 2.0, and GlassFish v3. The JSF 2.0 classes were obtained from the NetBeans JSF 2.0 bundled library. How to do it... As you know the h:commandLink takes an action after a link is clicked (on the mouse click event), while h:commandButton does the same thing, but renders a button, instead of a text link. In this case, we place a JavaScript confirmation box before the action starts its effect. This is useful in user tasks that can't be reversed, such as deleting accounts, database records, and so on. Therefore, the onclick event was implemented as shown next: How it works... Notice that we embed the JavaScript code inside the onclick event (you also may put it separately in a JS function, per example). When the user clicks the link or the button, a JS confi rmation box appear with two buttons. If you confirm the choice, the JSF action takes place, while if you deny it then nothing happens. There's more... You can use this recipe to display another JS box, such as prompt box or alert box. You can find this recipe in JSF 2.0 Cookbook from Packt From http://e-blog-java.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-to-integrate-javascript-and-jsf.html

Try with resources is a new feature in Java 7 which lets us write more elegant code by automatically closing resources like FileInputStream at the end of the try-block. Old Try Catch Finally Dealing with resources like InputStreams is painful when it comes to the try-catch-finally blocks. You need to declare the resources outside the try so that they are is accessible from finally, then you must initialize the variable to null and check for non-null when closing the resource in finally. File file = new File("input.txt"); InputStream is = null; try { is = new FileInputStream(file); // do something with this input stream // ... } catch (FileNotFoundException ex) { System.err.println("Missing file " + file.getAbsolutePath()); } finally { if (is != null) { is.close(); } } Java 7: Try with resources With Java 7, you can create one or more “resources” in the try statement. A “resources” is something that implements the java.lang.AutoCloseable interface. This resource would be automatically closed and the end of the try block. File file = new File("input.txt"); try (InputStream is = new FileInputStream(file)) { // do something with this input stream // ... } catch (FileNotFoundException ex) { System.err.println("Missing file " + file.getAbsolutePath()); } Exception handling If both the (explicit) try block and the (implicit) resource handling code throw an exception, then the try block exception is the one which will be thrown. The resource handling exception will be made available via the Throwable.getSupressed() method of the thrown exception. Throwable.getSupressed() is a new method added to the Throwable class since 1.7 specifically for this purpose. If there were no suppressed exceptions then this will return an empty array. Reference http://download.java.net/jdk7/docs/technotes/guides/language/try-with-resources.html From http://www.vineetmanohar.com/2011/03/java-7-try-with-auto-closable-resources/

Recently one of the readers of my blog asked how we can work with more then one web.config files in an asp.net application. So I decided to blog about that. Here is my response to their inquiry: You can work with more than one web.config file in asp.net, but you can not put more than one web.config in each folder. Let’s first understand the hierarchy of web.config and other configuration file settings. On the top of that, every configuration files you will have machine.config file which will have all system wide configuration settings. You can find this file in your OS drive like C: /windows/Microsoft.NET/vFrameworkNumber/Config folder. Here framework number with what ever framework you are using 1.1/2.0 or 4.0. You can override those settings in web.config file at the your application root folder. In the same way, you can add more web.config file in subfolder and can override the setting of parent folder web.config file. So we will create a hierarchy like the one shown below. Now let’s Create Project for it. In that I have create two web.config and 2 pages. First I have put the web.config in root folder and then I have put web.config in subfolder. In the same way, I have created a sub folder and then I have put the web.config in sub folder. I have also put one asp.net page in root as well as subfolder to use respective web.config settings. Below is an example of my folder arrangement: Below is code for root folder web.config. and following is code for sub folder web.config. After that I have written a code in root asp.net page to print settings from web.config folder like this following. using System;using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Linq;using System.Web;using System.Web.UI;using System.Web.UI.WebControls; namespace MoreWebConfig{ public partial class Root : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Write(System.Web.Configuration.WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get("Root")); Response.Write(""); Response.Write(System.Web.Configuration.WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get("MySetting")); } } In the same way, I have written code in subfolder like following. using System;using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Linq;using System.Web;using System.Web.UI;using System.Web.UI.WebControls; namespace MoreWebConfig.SubFolder{ public partial class SubFolderPage : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Write(System.Web.Configuration.WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get("Sub")); Response.Write(""); Response.Write(System.Web.Configuration.WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get("MySetting")); } } Now, let’s run both pages in browser one by one and you can see root folder application page is fetching settings from root folder web.config while sub folder application page is fetching setting from subfolder web.config even if key ‘mysetting’ is same on both as expected. You can see out put in browser below. Root.aspx SubFolderPage.aspx So it’s very easy to work with multiple web.config. The only limitation of this you can not access sub folder web.config settings from root folder page. Except all you can use anything. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more..Happy programming...

this tutorial will walk you through how to setup ibatis ( mybatis ) in a simple java project and will present how to work with dynamic queries (sql). pre-requisites for this tutorial i am using: ide: eclipse (you can use your favorite one) database: mysql libs/jars: mybatis , mysql conector and junit (for testing) this is how your project should look like: sample database please run the script into your database before getting started with the project implementation. you will find the script (with dummy data) inside the sql folder. 1 – article pojo i represented the pojo we are going to use in this tutorial with a uml diagram, but you can download the complete source code in the end of this article. the goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to retrieve the article information from database using dynamic sql to filter the data. 2 – article mapper – xml one of the most powerful features of mybatis has always been its dynamic sql capabilities. if you have any experience with jdbc or any similar framework, you understand how painful it is to conditionally concatenate strings of sql together, making sure not to forget spaces or to omit a comma at the end of a list of columns. dynamic sql can be downright painful to deal with. while working with dynamic sql will never be a party, mybatis certainly improves the situation with a powerful dynamic sql language that can be used within any mapped sql statement. the dynamic sql elements should be familiar to anyone who has used jstl or any similar xml based text processors. in previous versions of mybatis, there were a lot of elements to know and understand. mybatis 3 greatly improves upon this, and now there are less than half of those elements to work with. mybatis employs powerful ognl based expressions to eliminate most of the other elements. if choose (when, otherwise) trim (where, set) foreach let’s explain each one with examples. 1 – first scenario : we want to retrieve all the articles from database with an optional filter: title. in other words, if user specify an article title, we are going to retrieve the articles that match with the title, otherwise we are going to retrieve all the articles from database. so we are going to implement a condition (if) : select id, title, author from article where id_status = 1 and title like #{title} 2 – second scenario : now we have two optional filters: article title and author. the user can specify both, none or only one filter. so we are going to implement two conditions: select id, title, author from article where id_status = 1 and title like #{title} and author like #{author} 3 – third scenario : now we want to give the user only one option: the user will have to specify only one of the following filters: title, author or retrieve all the articles from ibatis category. so we are going to use a choose element: select id, title, author from article where id_status = 1 and title like #{title} and author like #{author} and id_category = 3 4 – fourth scenario : take a look at all three statements above. they all have a condition in common: where id_status = 1. it means we are already filtering the active articles let’s remove this condition to make it more interesting. select id, title, author from article where title like #{title} and author like #{author} what if both title and author are null? we are going to have the following statement: select id, title, authorfrom articlewhere and what if only the author is not null? we are going to have the fololwing statement: select id, title, authorfrom articlewhereand author like #{author} and both fails! how to fix it? 5 – fifth scenario : we want to retrieve all the articles with two optional filters: title and author. to avoid the 4th scenatio, we are going to use a where element: select id, title, author from article title like #{title} and author like #{author} mybatis has a simple answer that will likely work in 90% of the cases. and in cases where it doesn’t, you can customize it so that it does. the where element knows to only insert “where” if there is any content returned by the containing tags. furthermore, if that content begins with “and” or “or”, it knows to strip it off. if the where element does not behave exactly as you like, you can customize it by defining your own trim element. for example,the trim equivalent to the where element is: select id, title, author from article title like #{title} and author like #{author} the overrides attribute takes a pipe delimited list of text to override, where whitespace is relevant. the result is the removal of anything specified in the overrides attribute, and the insertion of anything in the with attribute. you can also use the trim element with set. 6 – sixth scenario : the user will choose all the categories an article can belong to. so in this case, we have a list (a collection), and we have to interate this collection and we are going to use a foreach element: select id, title, author from article title like #{title} and author like #{author} the foreach element is very powerful, and allows you to specify a collection, declare item and index variables that can be used inside the body of the element. it also allows you to specify opening and closing strings, and add a separator to place in between iterations. the element is smart in that it won’t accidentally append extra separators. note : you can pass a list instance or an array to mybatis as a parameter object. when you do, mybatis will automatically wrap it in a map, and key it by name. list instances will be keyed to the name “list” and array instances will be keyed to the name “array”. the complete article.xml file looks like this: select id, title, author from article where id_status = 1 and title like #{title} select id, title, author from article where id_status = 1 and title like #{title} and author like #{author} select id, title, author from article where id_status = 1 and title like #{title} and author like #{author} and id_category = 3 select id, title, author from article title like #{title} and author like #{author} select id, title, author from article title like #{title} and author like #{author} select id, title, author from article where id_category in #{category} download if you want to download the complete sample project, you can get it from my github account: https://github.com/loiane/ibatis-dynamic-sql if you want to download the zip file of the project, just click on download: there are more articles about ibatis to come. stay tooned! happy coding! from http://loianegroner.com/2011/03/ibatis-mybatis-working-with-dynamic-queries-sql/

One of the new features added in Java 7 is the capability to switch on a String. With Java 6, or less String color = "red"; if (color.equals("red")) { System.out.println("Color is Red"); } else if (color.equals("green")) { System.out.println("Color is Green"); } else { System.out.println("Color not found"); } String color = "red"; if (color.equals("red")) { System.out.println("Color is Red"); } else if (color.equals("green")) { System.out.println("Color is Green"); } else { System.out.println("Color not found"); } With Java 7: String color = "red"; switch (color) { case "red": System.out.println("Color is Red"); break; case "green": System.out.println("Color is Green"); break; default: System.out.println("Color not found"); } Conclusion The switch statement when used with a String uses the equals() method to compare the given expression to each value in the case statement and is therefore case-sensitive and will throw a NullPointerException if the expression is null. It is a small but useful feature which not only helps us write more readable code but the compiler will likely generate more efficient bytecode as compared to the if-then-else statement. From http://www.vineetmanohar.com/2011/03/new-java-7-feature-string-in-switch-support/

This tutorial will walk you through how to setup iBatis (MyBatis) in a simple Java project and will present an example using a discriminator column, in another words it is a inheritance mapping tutorial. Pre-Requisites For this tutorial I am using: IDE: Eclipse (you can use your favorite one) DataBase: MySQL Libs/jars: Mybatis, MySQL conector and JUnit (for testing) This is how your project should look like: Sample Database Please run the script into your database before getting started with the project implementation. You will find the script (with dummy data) inside the sql folder. 1 – POJOs – Beans I represented the beans here with a UML model, but you can download the complete source code in the end of this article. As you can see on the Data Modeling Diagram and the UML diagram above, we have a class Employee and two subclasses: Developer and Manager. The goal of this tutorial is to retrieve all the Employees from the database, but these employees can be an instance of Developer or Manager, and we are going to use a discriminator column to see which class we are going to instanciate. 2 – Employee Mapper – XML Sometimes a single database query might return result sets of many different (but hopefully somewhat related) data types. The discriminator element was designed to deal with this situation, and others, including class inheritance hierarchies. The discriminator is pretty simple to understand, as it behaves much like a switch statement in Java. A discriminator definition specifies column and javaType attributes. The column is where MyBatis will look for the value to compare. The javaType is required to ensure the proper kind of equality test is performed (although String would probably work for almost any situation). SELECT id, name, employee_type, manager_id, info, developer_id, product FROM employee E left join manager M on M.employee_id = E.id left join developer D on D.employee_id = E.id In this example, MyBatis would retrieve each record from the result set and compare its employee type value. If it matches any of the discriminator cases, then it will use the resultMap specified by the case. This is done exclusively, so in other words, the rest of the resultMap is ignored (unless it is extended, which we talk about in a second). If none of the cases match, then MyBatis simply uses the resultMap as defined outside of the discriminator block. So, if the managerResult was declared as follows: Now all of the properties from both the managerResult and developerResult will be loaded. Once again though, some may find this external definition of maps somewhat tedious. Thereforethere’s an alternative syntax for those that prefer a more concise mapping style. For example: SELECT id, name, employee_type, manager_id, info, developer_id, product FROM employee E left join manager M on M.employee_id = E.id left join developer D on D.employee_id = E.id Remember that these are all Result Maps, and if you don’t specify any results at all, then MyBatis willautomatically match up columns and properties for you. So most of these examples are more verbosethan they really need to be. That said, most databases are kind of complex and it’s unlikely that we’ll beable to depend on that for all cases. 3 - Employee Mapper – Annotations We did the configuration in XML, now let’s try to use annotations to do the same thing we did using XML. This is the code for EmployeeMapper.java: package com.loiane.data; import java.util.List; import org.apache.ibatis.annotations.Case;import org.apache.ibatis.annotations.Result;import org.apache.ibatis.annotations.Select;import org.apache.ibatis.annotations.TypeDiscriminator; import com.loiane.model.Developer;import com.loiane.model.Employee;import com.loiane.model.Manager; public interface EmployeeMapper { final String SELECT_EMPLOYEE = "SELECT id, name, employee_type, manager_id, info, developer_id, product " + "FROM employee E left join manager M on M.employee_id = E.id " + "left join developer D on D.employee_id = E.id "; /** * Returns the list of all Employee instances from the database. * @return the list of all Employee instances from the database. */ @Select(SELECT_EMPLOYEE) @TypeDiscriminator(column = "employee_type", cases = { @Case (value="1", type = Manager.class, results={ @Result(property="managerId", column="manager_id"), @Result(property="info"), }), @Case (value="2", type = Developer.class, results={ @Result(property="developerId", column="developer_id"), @Result(property="project", column="product"), }) }) List getAllEmployeesAnnotation();} If you are reading this blog lately, you are already familiar with the @Select and @Result annotations. So let’s skip it. Let’s talk about the @TypeDiscriminator and @Case annotations. @TypeDiscriminator A group of value cases that can be used to determine the result mapping to perform. Attributes: column, javaType, jdbcType, typeHandler, cases. The cases attribute is an array of Cases. @Case A single case of a value and its corresponding mappings. Attributes: value, type, results. The results attribute is an array of Results, thus this Case Annotation is similar to an actual ResultMap, specified by the Results annotation below. In this example: We set the column atribute for @TypeDiscriminator to determine which column MyBatis will look for the value to compare. And we set an array of @Case. For each @Case we set the value, so if the column matches the value, MyBatis will instanciate a object of type we set and we also set an array of @Result to match column with class atribute. Note one thing: using XML we set the id and name properties. We did not set these properties using annotations. It is not necessary, because the column matches the atribute name. But if you need to set, it is going to look like this: @Select(SELECT_EMPLOYEE)@Results(value = { @Result(property="id"), @Result(property="name")})@TypeDiscriminator(column = "employee_type", cases = { @Case (value="1", type = Manager.class, results={ @Result(property="managerId", column="manager_id"), @Result(property="info"), }), @Case (value="2", type = Developer.class, results={ @Result(property="developerId", column="developer_id"), @Result(property="project", column="product"), })})List getAllEmployeesAnnotation(); 4 – EmployeeDAO In the DAO, we have two methods: the first one will call the select statement from the XML and the second one will call the annotation method. Both returns the same result. package com.loiane.dao; import java.util.List; import org.apache.ibatis.session.SqlSession;import org.apache.ibatis.session.SqlSessionFactory; import com.loiane.data.EmployeeMapper;import com.loiane.model.Employee; public class EmployeeDAO { /** * Returns the list of all Employee instances from the database. * @return the list of all Employee instances from the database. */ @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") public List selectAll(){ SqlSessionFactory sqlSessionFactory = MyBatisConnectionFactory.getSqlSessionFactory(); SqlSession session = sqlSessionFactory.openSession(); try { List list = session.selectList("Employee.getAllEmployees"); return list; } finally { session.close(); } } /** * Returns the list of all Employee instances from the database. * @return the list of all Employee instances from the database. */ public List selectAllUsingAnnotations(){ SqlSessionFactory sqlSessionFactory = MyBatisConnectionFactory.getSqlSessionFactory(); SqlSession session = sqlSessionFactory.openSession(); try { EmployeeMapper mapper = session.getMapper(EmployeeMapper.class); List list = mapper.getAllEmployeesAnnotation(); return list; } finally { session.close(); } } The output if you call one of these methods and print: Employee ID = 1 Name = Kate Manager ID = 1 Info = info KateEmployee ID = 2 Name = Josh Developer ID = 1 Project = webEmployee ID = 3 Name = Peter Developer ID = 2 Project = desktopEmployee ID = 4 Name = James Manager ID = 2 Info = info JamesEmployee ID = 5 Name = Susan Developer ID = 3 Project = web Download If you want to download the complete sample project, you can get it from my GitHub account: https://github.com/loiane/ibatis-discriminator If you want to download the zip file of the project, just click on download: There are more articles about iBatis to come. Stay tooned! From http://loianegroner.com/2011/03/ibatis-mybatis-discriminator-column-example-inheritance-mapping-tutorial/

Sonar is an open source web-based application to manage code quality which covers seven axes of code quality as: Architecture and design, comments, duplications, unit tests, complexity, potential bugs and coding rules. Developed in Java and can cover projects in Java, Flex, PHP, PL/SQL, Cobol and Visual Basic 6. It's very efficient to navigate, offering visual reporting and you can follow metrics evolution of your project and combine them. There is an online project called Nemo dedicated to open source projects, as you can see projects like Jetty, Apache Lucene and Apache Tomcat. So, let's config Sonar to work together with Maven. First of all set up Sonar server and other configurations in Maven's settings.xml file: sonar true jdbc:postgresql://localhost/sonar org.postgresql.Driver user password http://localhost:9000 You must to have a Sonar server running and define it in sonar.host.url parameter. In this example I'm using the default Sonar URL, http://localhost:9000 , and you must set user name and password for your database. To install local Sonar Server you can see this link. After that, to execute the code analysers and save results in Sonar database just execute mvn sonar:sonar. You can config Sonar to execute in your CI (Continuous Integration) application. Hudson is a perfect match, because there is a Sonar plugin for it. See the final result below: I prefer Teamcity CI, but there isn't a stable plugin as you can see in compatibility matrix. To resolve this plugin's problem, just add sonar:sonar in the maven command executed by Teamcity. Sonar is an essential tool for your software project to help you evaluating how cohesive your classes are, warning for future problems as code complexity or duplication problems arise, and will help you to have a cleaner code. If you have any question or some difficulties, contact me.

Tabs for web pages in browsers are usually arranged horizontally, on top of the browser window. This arrangement has two disadvantages: First, with many tabs, it becomes impossible to read their titles. Second, horizontal tabs take up valuable vertical space on widescreen displays. The obvious solution is to arrange them vertically. Firefox has several ways to do this. It is one of three features I still miss from Chrome. But there now is a way to turn on a beta version of this feature in Chrome. This post explains how. Horizontal tabs: Vertical space is wasted, tab titles become hard to read. Vertical tabs: Better use of horizontal space on widescreen displays, titles readable even with many tabs. You can tell that its a beta feature, because everything still looks a bit ugly. First step: Windows: Type “about:flags” into the address bar. Enable “Side Tabs”. Restart Chrome [details]. Mac Open Chrome from Terminal like this: /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome -enable-vertical-tabs If you want to make this more permanent: Rename the binary mentioned above (e.g. to “Google Chrome Binary”) and put a shell script that invokes it in its place [details]: #!/bin/bash exec "${0%/*}/Google Chrome Binary" -enable-vertical-tabs "$@"Second step: Toggle vertical bars via the context menu that opens on a tab. Second step: Toggle vertical bars via the context menu that opens on a tab.

I don’t really remember when I first heard the phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but I’ve used it plenty. Upon reflection I’ve mostly used it to avoid doing boring or unappealing work – endeavoring to cast undesirable requests as wasteful and unnecessary changes. Thinking about it though, there is a fair bit of wisdom in the saying. Researching its origins turns up a surprisingly recent (to me anyway) provenance. Apparently one T. Bert (Thomas Bertram) Lance, Director of the Office of Management and Budget in US president Jimmy Carter’s 1977 administration is often accorded recognition for first use (although there appears to be a reasonable case for it already being in circulation in the Southern United States). He is quoted in a newsletter as follows: Bert Lance believes he can save Uncle Sam billions if he can get the government to adopt a simple motto: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” He explains: “That’s the trouble with government: Fixing things that aren’t broken and not fixing things that are broken.” Hard to argue with that, eh? Having used (and possibly abused) this phrase for years, I was given pause for thought yesterday when it was tossed my way. It’s not like it’s the first time that’s occurred, but it was one of the less regular occasions where I thought , “OK, maybe what I’m trying to change isn’t broken per se, but it could be better.” For the last few years my work has involved a lot of change. My organization has transitioned (indeed continues to transition) from a very rigid, waterfall style process of software development to an agile one. When we started out we had a pretty naïve idea of what this entailed. We were already doing work in iterations – kinda – by providing a new build to our QA/testing people every two weeks. We made a series of small changes over a relatively short period of time (I wrote about those here, here and here) and ultimately we settled upon Scrum as our specific flavor of agile. You don’t have to spend long with Scrum to realize that one large facet of it is pushing for something a bit different to the idea of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” (which henceforth I’m shortening to IIABDFI.) It’s pushing continuous improvement, or Kaizen to borrow the rather snazzy Japanese word for it. This notion is baked right in to Scrum, with every sprint having a retrospective at the end where the team looks for ways in which they might improve things. As much as I latched onto and used the IIABDFI idea, I find Kaizen considerably more appealing. IIABDFI is mostly a crutch for me to skirt doing boring work. But Kaizen appeals to my inner perfectionist. Anyone who’s worked with me can probably tell you that I have tendency (likely somewhat annoying) to always critique the status quo. I can’t seem to help seeing things that we could change that I think would make everything just a little bit better. This characteristic hasn’t served me too badly in the past, and when I’ve worked with people of a similar bent it’s created quite a good dynamic with people all interested in continuous improvement bringing in great new ideas and accepting them from others. There can be moments of trouble if two well meaning people hold strongly differing views on what constitutes "better", but mostly things are obvious enough as improvements that a little debate is all it takes to agree upon trying them out. I’d never really thought about these two ideas juxtaposed though, until today. Kaizen really resonates with me. But, as IIABDFI says, changing things that aren’t broken is indeed wasteful. So, how to reconcile the two? Well, I think its all about degree. If there’s a potentially worthwhile pay off, if it’s reasonably cheap to try, maybe it is well worth changing things that aren’t especially broken. You might learn through trying your new approach that what seemed reasonable before was, if not broken, ripe for substantial improvement. And if it doesn’t pan out? That should be OK. Trying new things involves some risk. Sometimes things don’t work and you need to revert to the original way of doing things. Unless you’re drastically affecting quality or productivity or some other key facet of software development then I’d argue that trying new things should be encouraged. If, on the other hand you’re thinking of a disruptive or expensive change, and the outcome is uncertain, and what you’re already doing is seemingly OK, perhaps that’s a red flag. Perhaps that’s when you need a slap around the head from IIABDFI to remind you not to get carried away. What do you think?

In this multi-part post, I’m going to share my personal experiences while working with user stories for gathering, tracking and planning requirements. It currently consists out of three parts: What are they and why do you need them? Who writes them and how do you control scope? Where do you start and what about the planning? You can also download all parts as one comprehensive PDF for easy printing or e-reading. Where do you start? Suppose that after intensive discussions and tough scoping sessions you ended up with a list of user stories and are about to start building the system. The first story not only needs to realize some particular feature, but also involves building a skeleton implementation of the system’s architecture. How do you avoid spending way too much time on plumbing and other general purpose stuff you need for the rest of the stories? The article Managing the Bootstrap Story by Jennitta Andrea addressed this challenge in more detail and offers some alternative solutions. One of these solutions is to find and define a user story with the product owner that offers minimal functionality yet still has project value. Such a story is often referred to as the backbone story because you realize the backbone of your system in it. It’s quite common to use the backbone story to realize a proof-of-concept (PoC) that verifies the chosen architecture. Since a working PoC can give the product owner confidence that the team is able to build such a product, that fact alone may be enough project value for the product owner. More storyotypes? You might have suspected it already, but that backbone story is just an example of another storyotype. In fact, after I started looking for an approach to capture the non-functional requirements of a project or system, I ran into a slide deck that mentioned a whole set of additional storyotypes. Dan Rawsthorne, the author, tried to define a storyotype for virtually every possible thing you might need to do in a project. Personally I think he went a bit too far, but a small set of additional storyotypes proved to be very useful anyway. Storyotype Description Compound Epic A composite user story that groups a number of stories in a logical sense. Complex Epic A user story whose content and impact must be determined later in the project, but for which it is clear that it involves a significant amount of work. Setup A story that is used to setup the project environment, including a source control environment, a project website, a build server. Technical A story that involves making a technical improvement or adjustment. Examples include introducing a coding standard, refactoring a poor design, executing a performance test. Documentation A story for writing a user manual, installation manual, etc. Training A story for developing and/or hosting a training, or having a workshop with end users. Quality Improvements A story which objective is to fix a collection of related bugs, or spent a fixed amount of time to improve the quality of the code base. Spike A story that aims to do a technical investigation to determine the usability of a specific technology, or for trying an alternative technical solution. When is the story complete? So how do you know that a user story has been successfully realized? Well, if all is good, all stories will conform with INVEST and are associated with a number of acceptance criteria (typically written down as the how-to demo) specified by the product owner. That should be enough to determine if it is functionally sound. But what you still miss is a way of explaining the stakeholders, including the product owner, when the team treats the story as finished. That may differ by team, but usually includes some or more of the following criteria. The code compiles and there are no warnings or errors. The code meets the coding standards setup by the project or the organization. The code is reviewed by a peer developer. All automated unit and integration tests have completed successfully. Visual Studio’s static code analysis tool does not report any violations. ReSharper reports no potential errors (a.k.a. everything is 'green'). The daily integration build has completed successfully. The functionality was tested by another member of the team (anybody but the developer). The feature or functionality has been signed off using the project checklist. The system functionality is tested by a tester. The visual look and feel is has been approved by an employee of the communications department. Together with the story’s how-to demo these criteria are commonly referred to as the definition-of-done. Usually, a team or project will have a default definition-of-done that applies to all stories and only mentions the particulars of that story if necessary. Then what about the planning? User stories are an excellent unit for tracking progress within your project. However, purists within the Agile community will tell you that an Agile project will have no long term plan. Instead, the functionality is realized iteratively according to the priority defined by the product owner. I agree with the latter and believe that its iterative nature is essential for dealing with the changing requirements that are common in all projects. It allows deferring decisions to the last responsible moment, and that’s always a good thing. But in reality you often can’t escape from providing at least a rough schedule to your management. How should you deal with that? What I often do to get all stakeholders to join me in a number of workshops. Using use case diagrams to illustrate the context of the discussions, I try to get enough stories on paper to represent the entire scope of the project. You need to beware though that you don’t write down too much details or have too much in-depth discussions. That would give the stakeholders a false sense of precision, and consequently, will cause them to see the stories as a formal functional design. Also, if you run into some high-level chunk of functionality for which nobody really knows what it will look like, add an epic story for it and include a spike to elaborate on the epic later on in the project. Then organize a number of shorter meetings with the team or, if the team hasn’t been formed yet, with a few experienced developers. Let them discuss every story one by one and then try to estimate the size of each story in so called story points. Some people from the Agile community say you should estimate using relative sizes only. In other words, a story that seems to require twice as much work as another story should also have twice as many story points. The story point as a unit does not have value. It’s the relative differences that are important. What works for me is that every story point corresponds to the ideal day of an experienced senior software developer. In other words, one story point means that an experienced developer familiar with the chosen architecture, technology and project methodology needs to work for 8 hours without being disturbed by telephone, email, coffee breaks, or any other distractions. Mike Cohn, author of User Stories Applied, has dedicated many chapters to this estimation technique. Ideally, each story is between 1 and 8 story points, but at the beginning of the project you still may have some epics to break up. After finishing those meetings you should have an estimate of the total size of the project. Now, in order to get from those story points to a total number of hours you need to estimate the expected productivity of the team. Mike Cohn does this by creating a table with the expected roles, their availability (to deal with part time employees), and the expected productivity compared to the ideal senior developer (as a percentage). By calculating the average productivity and multiplying it with the number of story points you’ll end up with the total number of estimated man-hours. It’s only an estimate and both the productivity can be disappointing as well as the estimate in story points may appear to be wrong. But it still gives you an initial estimate that can be used for global planning and budget discussions. Obviously it is important to ensure that you keep on continuously measuring the actual productivity. Wow, now what? By now, it should be clear that a user story is not an independent concept but something that closely resonates with many of the aspects of our work in the software industry. In this multi-part post I have tried to explain a number of those aspects and to clarify the relationship between them. But even though I’ve not touched everything as detailed as possible, I still hope I've managed to convince you about the power and potential of user stories. Last but not least, if you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to email me at [email protected] or tweet me at my Twitter ID ddoomen.

Java 7 uses the underlying file system functionalities to watch the file system for changes. Now, we can watch for events like creation, deletion, modification, and get involved with our own actions. For accomplish this task, we need: • An object implementing the Watchable interface - the Path class is perfect for this job. • A set of events that we are interested in - we will use StandardWatchEventKind which implements the WatchEvent.Kind. • An event modifier that qualifies how a Watchable is registered with a WatchService. • A watcher who watch some watchable – per example, a watcher that watches the File System for changes. The abstract class is java.nio.file.WatchService but we will be using the FileSystem object to create a watcher for the File System. The below example follows the above scenario: import java.nio.file.Path; import java.nio.file.Paths; import java.nio.file.StandardWatchEventKind; import java.nio.file.WatchEvent; import java.nio.file.WatchKey; import java.nio.file.WatchService; import java.util.List; public class Main { public static void main(String[] args) { //define a folder root Path myDir = Paths.get("D:/data"); try { WatchService watcher = myDir.getFileSystem().newWatchService(); myDir.register(watcher, StandardWatchEventKind.ENTRY_CREATE, StandardWatchEventKind.ENTRY_DELETE, StandardWatchEventKind.ENTRY_MODIFY); WatchKey watckKey = watcher.take(); List> events = watckKey.pollEvents(); for (WatchEvent event : events) { if (event.kind() == StandardWatchEventKind.ENTRY_CREATE) { System.out.println("Created: " + event.context().toString()); } if (event.kind() == StandardWatchEventKind.ENTRY_DELETE) { System.out.println("Delete: " + event.context().toString()); } if (event.kind() == StandardWatchEventKind.ENTRY_MODIFY) { System.out.println("Modify: " + event.context().toString()); } } } catch (Exception e) { System.out.println("Error: " + e.toString()); } } } The FileSystem object and the WatchService can also be created like this: FileSystem fileSystem = FileSystems.getDefault(); WatchService watcher = fileSystem.newWatchService(); And the Path (watchable), what we watch, and register it with the WatchService object like this: Path myDir = fileSystem.getPath("D:/data"); myDir.register(watcher, StandardWatchEventKind.ENTRY_CREATE, StandardWatchEventKind.ENTRY_DELETE, StandardWatchEventKind.ENTRY_MODIFY);

The purpose of a Fake Object, a kind of Test Double, is to replace a collaborator with a functional copy. While Mocks prefer a specification of the behavior to check, Fake Objects are really a simplified version of the production object they substitute. A good Fake Object, however, will be very lightweight, easy to create and throw away to ensure test isolation. Usually it won't satisfy some other functional or non-functional requirements, otherwise we would use him instead of the real object. For example a UserRepository, which normally stores users in a database, may be substitued by a Fake that: does not send mails when an user is added. Doesn't really save anything in the database, but keeps a list in an array. When some complex method is called, just throws a NonImplementedException. Utility Of course performance and less brittleness of tests are the main selling points of a Fake Objects: think about testing with a real database and without one; however this is true for all Test Doubles and I don't need to repeat it. Often the Fake is used when the contract between the SUT and the collaborator is too complex to effectively build a Stub or Mock: many methods, or many calls to the same method are made. Return parameters are difficult to setup. A Fake avoids overspecifying a test for a very invasive contract, like the order of calls and precise parameters; a real implementation is more robust to changes in the contract. For example if the Fake is a collection, you can store and retrieve objects of another type, and still not change the Fake; expectations and configured return value instead would change (together). As an example, an embryonal Fake is PHPUnit $this->returnArgument() for the will() Mock expectation. It's a piece of functionality which substitutes an hard-coded expectation, in order to return one of the arguments of the call instead of adding the argument to the expectation itself. Note that many times we don't have to create new code to leverage Fakes: we can use the existing one with a different configuration (like a Cache maximumCachedItems=0, or with an adapter that use an in-memory cache instead of APC or Memcache) or something provided for us, like an sqlite in-memory database created by PDO. NullObjects are sometimes Fake, but are used in production more than in testing. Implementation Several steps are necessary for building an hand-rolled Fake: create the Fake class by hand, and define the simplest implementation that could do the job for this test. Remember, you're not testing the Fake, you're testing the SUT, so the Fake doesn't have to be perfect, but just passable for the test case at end. Instance an object from the Fake class: the constructor may be different from the real collaborator's one as it's not part of the contract. Install the Fake into the SUT, and proceed as normal. The steps for generating a Fake with PHPUnit are a little different; however, you will still have to write its businss logic: create the "mock" as always via getMock() or getMockBuilder(). Define expectations for its methods with will($this->returnCallback()) and some anonymous functions (or via self-shunting like we did for "Stubs"). Often objects passed in this closures (such as ArrayObject instances) can aid in making the Fake methods communicate with each other. Install the Fake and proceed with the test. The second approach is invaluable when you have a single method on the Fake: it's very fast. Variations Fake Database: an alternative implementation of the Database Facade that lets you test classes that depend on the database without actually using it. For exaple, a DAO which internally use an SplObjectStorage instead of the connection. In-Memory Database: sqlite3 in-memory database used with ORMs for tests that isolate you from the real database, but not from using PDO. High Return On Investment. Fake Web Service: mimics the interface of some web service like Google Analytics, when you have to interact also in write and not only in read. Fake Service Layer: simplified implementations of Service Layer classes, which avoid checking concurrency, authorization, authentication and so on in order to simplify functional testing. Example In this code sample, the test target a ForumManager class which needs to manipulate Posts. It's not a simple Facade: it moves Post around, merges threads and so on. So we inject in it a FakePostDao: ForumManager will call it instead of the database. When you I have many tests of this type, the time for writing the Fake implementation is well spent. array( new Post('Hello'), new Post('Hello!'), new Post('') ), 2 => array( new Post('Hi'), new Post('Hi!') ), 3 => array( new Post('Good morning.') ) )); $forumManager = new ForumManager($dao); $forumManager->mergeThreadsByIds(1, 2); $thread = $dao->getThread(1); $this->assertEquals(5, count($thread)); } } /** * The SUT. */ class ForumManager { private $dao; public function __construct(PostsDao $dao) { $this->dao = $dao; } public function mergeThreadsByIds($originalId, $toBeMergedId) { $original = $this->dao->getThread($originalId); $toBeMerged = $this->dao->getThread($toBeMergedId); $newOne = array_merge($original, $toBeMerged); $this->dao->removeThread($originalId); $this->dao->removeThread($toBeMergedId); $this->dao->addThread($originalId, $newOne); } } /** * Interface for the collaborator to substitute with the Test Double. */ interface PostsDao { public function getThread($id); public function removeThread($id); public function addThread($id, array $thread); } /** * Fake implementation. */ class FakePostDao implements PostsDao { private $threads; public function __construct(array $initialState) { $this->threads = $initialState; } public function getThread($id) { return $this->threads[$id]; } public function removeThread($id) { unset($this->threads[$id]); } /** * We model Thread as array of Posts for simplicity. */ public function addThread($id, array $thread) { $this->threads[$id] = $thread; } } /** * Again a Dummy object: minimal implementation, to make this test pass. */ class Post { }

I know. I have not been very kind to systems thinking in my recent “Complexity vs. Lean” presentation. But most systems thinkers are nice and smart people, and so I will try and make up with this Top 15 of Systems Thinking Books. I created this list by finding suggestions on Systems Thinking groups (here, here and here), and some intensive searches on Amazon. The results are ranked by a combination of rating and popularity, both on Amazon and GoodReads. (For example, Peter M. Senge’s book is the most popular, but Donella Meadows book has better ratings both on Amazon and on GoodReads, which is why her book won the top slot.) Oh, and in case you’re wondering. I only read three of the books in this list. But I just added three more to my shopping cart. :-) Enjoy… 1 Donella Meadows Thinking in Systems: A Primer 2 Peter M. Senge The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization 3 Gerald M. Weinberg An Introduction to General Systems Thinking 4 Michael C. Jackson Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers 5 Russell L. Ackoff Re-Creating the Corporation: A Design of Organizations for the 21st Century 6 Ervin Laszlo The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time 7 Linda B. Sweeney, Dennis Meadows The Systems Thinking Playbook: Exercises to Stretch and Build Learning and Systems Thinking Capabilities 8 Jamshid Gharajedaghi Systems Thinking, Second Edition: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture 9 Dennis Sherwood Seeing the Forest for the Trees: A Manager's Guide to Applying Systems Thinking 10 John D. Sterman Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World 11 Russell L. Ackoff, Herbert J. Addison Systems Thinking for Curious Managers: With 40 New Management f-Laws 12 Peter Checkland Systems Thinking, Systems Practice: Includes a 30-Year Retrospective 13 Stephen G. Haines The Manager's Pocket Guide to Systems Thinking and Learning 14 Joy Richmond, Lees Stuntz, Kathy Richmond, Joanne Egner Tracing Connections: Voices of Systems Thinkers 15 John Boardman, Brian Sauser Systems Thinking: Coping with 21st Century Problems And I'm tossing in two extra books that aren't really about Systems Thinking, but they seem to be mentioned regularly among systems thinkers... - John Gall The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small - Lars Skyttner General Systems Theory Jurgen is an experienced author, trainer, and speaker. Why don’t you hire him to add some spice to your company event or seminar?

This short post adds to my series on connection options in the SQL Server Driver for PHP. I’ll go into a bit more detail on the Encrypt and TrustServerCertificate options than the driver documentation does. I’ll start with three important points related to these options, then I’ll go into a couple of hypothetical situations that should shed more light on what these options actually do. The first thing to note is that these two options, Encrypt and TrustServerCertificate, are often used together. The Encrypt option is used to specify whether or not the connection to the server is encrypted (the default is false). The TrustServerCertificate option is used to indicate whether the certificate on the SQL Server instance should be trusted (the default is false). Note: Setting the Encrypt option does not mean that data is stored in an encrypted form. It simply means that data is encrypted while in transport to the server. Also note that this setting does not apply to authentication credentials such as a SQL Server password – authentication credentials are always encrypted. For information about storing encrypted data, see Encryption Hierarchy in the SQL Server documentation. The second thing to note is that, by default, when SQL Server is installed it creates a self-signed certificate that it will use to encrypt connections. Of course, self-signed certificates are not ideal for secure connections (they are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks), so it is best to replace this certificate with one from a certificate authority (CA). The third thing to know is how to use these options when connecting to SQL Server. If you are using the SQLSRV API, your connection code might look something like this: $serverName = "serverName"; $connectionInfo = array( "Database"=>"DbName", "UID"=>"UserName", "PWD"=>"Password", "Encrypt"=>true, "TrustServerCertificate"=>false); $conn = sqlsrv_connect( $serverName, $connectionInfo); If you are using the PDO_SQLSRV API, your connection code might look something like this: $serverName = "serverName"; $conn = new PDO("sqlsrv:Server = $serverName; Database = DBName; Encrypt = true; TrustServerCertificate = false", "UserName", "Password"); Now, with those three things in mind, let’s look at a couple of examples. First suppose the following: You did not replace the self-signed certificate created when SQL Server was installed. You set Encrypt = true. You set TrustServerCertificate = false. In this scenario, your connection will fail. When you set TrustServerCertificate = false, you are asking for some 3rd party verification of the certificate. Because this is a self-signed certificate, there is no 3rd party to do the verification. However, if you set TrustServerCertificate = true, then your connection will succeed because you are trusting the certificate. (Note that, as mentioned earlier, this connection would be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.) Now consider the following: You replaced the self-signed certificate created when SQL Server was installed with a certificate from a certificate authority (CA). You set Encrypt = true. In this case (assuming there are no problems with your certificate), regardless of your setting for TrustServerCertificate, your connection will succeed. However, for a more secure connection (one not vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks), you should set TrustServerCertificate = false. Doing so will force third party verification of the certificate. For information about installing a certificate on SQL Server, see How to: Enable Encrypted Connections to the Database Engine. Note that that topic references setting the Force Encryption option on the database server. Setting this option to Yes on the server does the same thing as setting Encryption = true on the client – it forces the connection to be encrypted using the server’s certificate. That’s it for today. Thanks. -Brian

this tutorial will walk you through how to setup ibatis ( mybatis ) in a simple java project and will present an example using a class constructor with arguments. pre-requisites for this tutorial i am using: ide: eclipse (you can use your favorite one) database: mysql libs/jars: mybatis , mysql conector and junit (for testing) this is how your project should look like: sample database please run the script into your database before getting started with the project implementation. you will find the script (with dummy data) inside the sql folder. 1 – pojo i represented the beans here with a uml model, but you can download the complete source code in the end of this article. as you can see, we do not have a default construtor in this class, only a constructor with some arguments. some persistence frameworks requires a default constructor, but you have to be careful with your business logic. let’s say there are a couple of mandatory atributes in your class. nothing is going to stop you if you do not set these atributes and try to insert, update on the database. and you problably will get an exception for that. to prevent this kind of situation, you can create a constructor with the mandatory arguments. and ibatis/ mybatis can handle this situation for you, because you do not need to create a default constructor. 2 – blog mapper – xml while properties will work for most data transfer object (dto) type classes, and likely most of yourdomain model, there may be some cases where you want to use immutable classes. often tables thatcontain reference or lookup data that rarely or never changes is suited to immutable classes.constructor injection allows you to set values on a class upon instantiation, without exposing publicmethods. mybatis also supports private properties and private javabeans properties to achieve this, butsome people prefer constructor injection. the constructor element enables this. in order to inject the results into the constructor, mybatis needs to identify the constructor by the type of its parameters. java has no way to introspect (or reflect) on parameter names. so when creating a constructor element, ensure that the arguments are in order, and that the data types are specified. if you need, you can still map another attributes, such as association, collection in your resultmap. following is the blog.xml file: select idblog as id, name, url from blog 3 - blog mapper – annotations we did the configuration in xml, now let’s try to use annotations to do the same thing we did using xml. this is the code for blogmapper.java: package com.loiane.data; import java.util.list; import org.apache.ibatis.annotations.arg; import org.apache.ibatis.annotations.constructorargs; import org.apache.ibatis.annotations.select; import com.loiane.model.blog; public interface blogmapper { /** * returns the list of all blog instances from the database. * @return the list of all blog instances from the database. */ @select("select idblog as id, name, url from blog ") @constructorargs(value = { @arg(column="id",javatype=integer.class), @arg(column="url",javatype=string.class) }) list selectallblogs(); } let’s take a look at the @constructorargs and @arg annotations: @constructorargs collects a group of results to be passed to a result object constructor. attributes: value, which is an array of args. xml equivalent: constructor @arg a single constructor argument that is part of a constructorargs collection. attributes: id, column, javatype, jdbctype, typehandler. the id attribute is a boolean value that identifies the property to be used for comparisons, similar to the xml element. xml equivalent: idarg, arg we do not need to use the @results annotation because the other attributes has the same name, so mybatis knows how to map them. download if you want to download the complete sample project, you can get it from my github account: https://github.com/loiane/ibatis-constructor if you want to download the zip file of the project, just click on download: there are more articles about ibatis to come. stay tooned! happy coding! once again though, some may find this external definition of maps somewhat tedious. thereforethere’s an alternative syntax for those that prefer a more concise mapping style.

There has been a lot of buzz lately on high-availability and clustering. Most developers don't care and why should they? These features should be transparent to the application architecture and not something of concern to the developers of that application. But knowledge never hurts, so I emerged myself into the world of load balancing, heartbeats and virtual IP addresses. And you know what? Next time we need a infrastructure like this, I can at least sit down with the guys from the infrastructure department and at least know what the hell they are talking about. So what exactly is a high-availability clustered infrastructure (HACI, as I'll call it from now on) ? In essence, it should be a zero-downtime infrastructure (or at least perceived as one by the end user, which means never ever returning a default browser 404 page), capable of horizontal scaling when the need for it arises and without a single point of failure. It's the SLA writer's dream. A basic HACI setup looks like this: The users enters through a virtual IP address, assigned to one of the two load balancers. Only one of the load-balancers is active (the active master, LB1), the other one is there in the event LB1 fails ((LB2, a passive slave). The two load balancers are redundant, ie. having the exact same configuration. The load balancers redirect all traffic to the real servers. This can be done through round-robin assignment or through other means like sticky sessions, where the same user is redirected to the same server each and every time within a session. Servers can be added at any moment and configured on the load balancers. Ideally, the load balancer configuration is aware of the hardware specification and balances the load accordingly, but that's beyond the scope of this article (it involves adding weights). If all servers balanced by the load balancer fail, a backup server should be used to redirect all traffic coming from the load balancer. This can be a very lightweight server, which purpose is only to provide a sensible error page to the user (something like 'Sorry, we are performing maintenance'). Again, perception and immediate feedback to the user is key. You don't want to show the user a plain 404 page. Off course, if the backup server goes down too, you're in trouble (off course, by that time, warning bells should have gone off on every level in the hierarchy). So how to achieve this with as little effort as possible? If you want to try this out, I suggest you start by installing a virtual machine like VirtualBox or VMWare. This way you can try out the configuration yourself. In this example, I'll be load-balancing 3 Tomcat servers using sticky sessions using 2 load balancers in active-passive mode. I'm assuming all 3 Tomcat servers share the same hardware configuration, so they are all able to handle the same amount of traffic each. I'm also throwing in a backup server, in case all 3 Tomcat servers go down (serving a custom 503 page kindly informing the user of a catastrophic failure, instead of dropping the standard 404 bomb). You want to start off by assigning IP addresses to the servers. This will make your life a bit easier. We'll need 7 addresses: 3 for the tomcat server, 1 for the backup server, 2 for the loadbalancers and 1 virtual IP address to be shared between the load balancers (and which will be the entry point for your users). So our assignment will be: Virtual IP 10.0.5.99 www.haci.local LB1 10.0.5.100 lb1.haci.local #MASTER LB2 10.0.5.101 lb2.haci.local #SLAVE WEB1 10.0.5.102 web1.haci.local WEB2 10.0.5.103 web2.haci.local WEB3 10.0.5.104 web3.haci.local BACKUP 10.0.5.105 backup.haci.local Setting up the web servers is easy. You just install Tomcat on each server and create a simple JSP file to be served to users (make a small change, like the background color, on each server to distinguish the servers). I won't be covering session replication between the Tomcat servers, as it'll take me too far. If you want, you can configure the appropriate session replication and storage (using multicast or JDBC for example). The backup server I'm using is a basic LAMP server that returns a simple 503 page on every request it gets. The 503 error code is important, because it reflects the current state of the system: currently unavailable. For the loadbalancers I'll be using 2 applications: HAProxy and keepalived. HAProxy is going to handle load balancing, while keepalived will handle the failover between the two load balancers. First, we're going to configure HAProxy for both LB1 and LB2. Installing HAProxy is quite easy on an ubuntu system. Just do a sudo apt-get install haproxy and you're off. After the install, backup the current HAProxy config and start editing away. cp /etc/haproxy.cfg /etc/haproxy.cfg_orig cat /dev/null > /etc/haproxy.cfg vi /etc/haproxy.cfg The content of the config to reflect our setup should become something like this (same config on LB1 and LB2): global log 127.0.0.1 local0 log 127.0.0.1 local1 notice #log loghost local0 info maxconn 4096 #debug #quiet user haproxy group haproxy defaults log global mode http option httplog option dontlognull retries 3 redispatch maxconn 2000 contimeout 5000 clitimeout 50000 srvtimeout 50000 frontend http-in bind 10.0.5.99:80 default_backend servers backend servers mode http stats enable stats auth someuser:somepassword balance roundrobin cookie JSESSIONID prefix option httpclose option forwardfor option httpchk HEAD /check.txt HTTP/1.0 server web1 10.0.5.102:80 cookie haci_web1 check server web2 10.0.5.103:80 cookie haci_web2 check server web3 10.0.5.104:80 cookie haci_web3 check server webbackup 10.0.5.105:80 backup After this, enable HAProxy on both LB1 and LB2 by editing /etc/defaults/haproxy # Set ENABLED to 1 if you want the init script to start haproxy. ENABLED=1 # Add extra flags here. #EXTRAOPTS="-de -m 16" So far for the HAProxy configuration. We can't start it up yet, as LB1 and LB2 aren't listening yet on the virtual IP address. Next we'll configure the failover of the loadbalancers using keepalived. Installing it on Ubuntu is as easy as it was for HAProxy: sudo apt-get install keepalived. But its configuration is slightly different on both load balancers. First, we need to configure the both servers to be able to listen to the shared IP address. Add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf: net.ipv4.ip_nonlocal_bind=1 And run sysctl -p Now, we configure keepalived so that LB1 is configured as the main load balancer and binds to the shared IP address, while LB2 is on standby, ready to take over whenever LB1 goes down. The configuration for LB1 looks like this (edit /etc/keepalived/keepalived.conf): vrrp_script chk_haproxy { # Requires keepalived-1.1.13 script "killall -0 haproxy" # cheaper than pidof interval 2 # check every 2 seconds weight 2 # add 2 points of prio if OK } vrrp_instance VI_1 { interface eth0 state MASTER virtual_router_id 51 priority 101 # 101 on master, 100 on backup virtual_ipaddress { 10.0.5.99 } track_script { chk_haproxy } } Start up keepalived and check whether it is listening to the virtual IP address. /etc/init.d/keepalived start ip addr sh eth0 It should return something like this, indicating it is listening to the virtual IP address 2: eth0: mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000 link/ether 00:0c:29:a5:5b:93 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 10.0.5.100/24 brd 10.0.5.255 scope global eth0 inet 10.0.5.99/32 scope global eth0 inet6 fe80::20c:29ff:fea5:5b93/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever Next, we configure LB2. The configuration is almost the same, exception for the priority. vrrp_script chk_haproxy { # Requires keepalived-1.1.13 script "killall -0 haproxy" # cheaper than pidof interval 2 # check every 2 seconds weight 2 # add 2 points of prio if OK } vrrp_instance VI_1 { interface eth0 state MASTER virtual_router_id 51 priority 100 # 101 on master, 100 on backup virtual_ipaddress { 10.0.5.99 } track_script { chk_haproxy } } Start up keepalived and check the network interface. /etc/init.d/keepalived start ip addr sh eth0 It should return something like this, indicating it is not listening to the virtual IP address 2: eth0: mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000 link/ether 00:0c:29:a5:5b:93 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 10.0.5.101/24 brd 10.0.5.255 scope global eth0 inet6 fe80::20c:29ff:fea5:5b93/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever Now, start up HAProxy on both LB1 and LB2. /etc/init.d/haproxy start Now you can issue requests to 10.0.5.99 (or www.haci.local), which will go to LB1, which in turn will load-balance the request to either WEB1, WEB2 and WEB3. You can test the load balancing by turning off WEB1 (or the server you're currently on). You can also the backup server by turning all main webservers (WEB1, WEB2 and WEB3). And you can test the loadbalancer failover by turning off LB1. At that point LB2 will kick in and act as the master, loadbalancing all requests. When you turn LB1 back on, it'll take over the master role once again. HAProxy allows you to add extra servers very easily, reloading the configuration without breaking existing sessions. See the HAProxy documentation for more info or on ServerFault. (http://serverfault.com/questions/165883/is-there-a-way-to-add-more-backend-server-to-haproxy-without-restarting-haproxy). Cheap and effective. While most enterprise shops have hardware load balancers, which also have these possibilities and more, if you're on a tight budget or need to simulate a HACI environment for development purposes (a lesson here: always simulate your production environment when you're testing during development), this might be the sane option. To finish, I'll quickly explain how to set up the backup server (a simple LAMP server). Create a vhost configuration on the apache for www.haci.local or any other domain pointing to the virtual IP address and set up mod_rewrite for it: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(css|gif|ico|jpg|js|png|swf|txt)$ [NC] RewriteConf %{REQUEST_URI} !/503.php RewriteRule .* /503.php [L] Then create the 503.php file and add this to the top of it: Sorry, our servers are currently undergoing maintenance. Please check back with us in a while. Thank you for your patience. You can decorate the 503.php file any way you like. You can even use CSS, JavaScript and image files in the php file. Now, back to my IDE. I'm getting withdrawal symptoms.

If you start off trying to get to grips with the in-built Java Secure Sockets Extension you're gonna be stunned by the complexity of it all.

The concept of behavior verification consists in verifying not only the output of the System Under Test, but the calls to other components. These method calls are an output normally not visible to a caller like the test; unless he injects, instead of the real collaborator, a Test Double which can be accessed also by him. Today we will explore the first pattern for behavior verification: the Test Spy. It is a Test Double which records calls so that assertions can be made on them later in the test (after the exercise part). Spies gives us the ability to observe side-effects of the SUT, expressed as interactions with other objects. Usually behavior verification is taught with Mocks, which also verify the calls that are made on them but with specifications provided before the exercise phase. Use cases Why using a Spy instead a Mock? I bet you have heard already about Mocks at this point in the series. Here are some possible use cases on when to define Test Spies. When we cannot predict what the collaborator will be called with (if we can, we may use a Mock instead). When an assertion on calls is complex to define beforehand, or needs all (or more than one of) the calls to be completed before taking place. The matchers used for Mocks are not sufficient for verification. When a Mock that immediately threw an exception would only result in the SUT swallowing it. So a Spy is better in this case as it leaves verification for later. PHPUnit matchers in general do not always throw an exception or always wait for the end of test (it depends on the particular constraint.) The behavior involves more than one collaborator (it happens sometimes). In this case, you can make an assertion using the data recorded by more than one Spy. Implementation 1. Like with all Test Doubles, provide an alternate implementation or subclass. Probably the calls to the Spy won't return anything (or will return something canned to avoid the SUT's failure, like in a Stub). The methods implementations will just record all calls, or some property of the calls like the first parameter or their total number. 2. Inject the Test Double and exercise the SUT. 3. Make assertions on the Test Double data gathered by the Spy. Variations The variations of the pattern are mainly on how to retrieve the data from the Test Spy. Retrieval Interface: the Test Spy is a class with additional methods, or public properties (eek) that expose the recorded data. This variation cannot be coded with PHPUnit generation of Test Doubles, only by hand-rolling them. Self Shunt: the Test Spy and Test Case Object are a single object. This means we inject $this as the Test Double and we have the maximum freedom of defining new methods and access the recording. The caveat is that it can only be done with interfaces in PHPUnit, because Test Case Classes must extend PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase. That's a good reason to extract an interface, though. Inner Test Double: we inject a private class (not existent in PHP) or a closure which records everything. A closure for example can access $this public properties or methods, or some other local ArrayObject passed by handler (or variable passed by reference) where the data can be kept. Indirect Output Registry: same as Inner Test Double, but the target for recordings is a full-fledged object. Almost always an overkill. Examples The sample code shows you how to implement a Spy, in its different variations and in use cases where it actually make sense. Most of the times, Mock are used instead and the pattern is equivalent. Test Spies are a little more difficult to write, but they are invaluable in the case where your verification logic does not fit the framework of Mocks (predefined, single-object expectations). createUser(array('mail' => '[email protected]', 'nickname' => 'johndoe')); $this->assertEquals(array('executeQuery', 'mail'), $this->order); } private $order = array(); private $queries = array(); public function executeQuery($query, array $params) { $this->order[] = 'executeQuery'; $this->queries[] = $query; } private $mails = array(); public function mail($to, $subject, $object) { $this->order[] = 'mail'; $this->mails[] = array('to' => $to, 'subject' => $subject, 'object' => $object); } public function testInnerTestDoubleArrayObject() { $parts = new ArrayObject(); $receiver = $this->getMock('Receiver'); $receiver->expects($this->any()) ->method('definePart') ->will($this->returnCallback(function($amount) use ($parts) { $parts[] = $amount; })); $sut = new RandomDivider($receiver); $sut->divide(10); $this->assertEquals(10, array_sum($parts->getArrayCopy())); } public function testInnerTestDoubleArrayPassedByReference() { $parts = array(); // an array would not be passed by handler by default $receiver = $this->getMock('Receiver'); $receiver->expects($this->any()) ->method('definePart') ->will($this->returnCallback(function($amount) use (&$parts) { // but we can pass it by reference $parts[] = $amount; })); $sut = new RandomDivider($receiver); $sut->divide(10); $this->assertEquals(10, array_sum($parts)); } } interface Mailer { public function mail($to, $subject, $object); } interface Db { public function executeQuery($query, array $params); } class UserDao { private $db; private $mailer; public function __construct(DB $db, Mailer $mailer) { $this->db = $db; $this->mailer = $mailer; } public function createUser(array $userDetails) { // internally it would use PDO $this->db->executeQuery("INSERT INTO users ...", $userDetails); $this->mailer->mail($userDetails['mail'], 'You have been registered on example.com', '...'); } } interface Receiver { public function definePart($amount); } class RandomDivider { private $receiver; public function __construct(Receiver $receiver) { $this->receiver = $receiver; } public function divide($total) { $part = ceil(rand() * $total); $this->receiver->definePart($part); $this->receiver->definePart($total - $part); } }