LOL (List of Links)

• Hamcrest integrated in JUnit 4.4 and above (JMock like expectations). Also allows Popper theories (the link in the release notes is available through archive.org). which are similar to TestNG's data points. There are also some examples: here, here, here and here (using Groovy).


• Window Licker an interesting approach to Swing testing. See the Calculator example and XP Day 2008 presentation.


• The bushfires are retribution for the damned. Apparently, God waited 5 months (or maybe he was too busy appearing in toast) to smite those Victorians down. The most annoying part of this is the fuzzy thinking. Instead of considering that it might be poor fuel management practices, bad advice on whether to stay or leave or global warming it's actually about abortion. If you can speak of a real Christian attitude, the people of North Queensland donating their flood relief money straight to the Victorians seems more along the right lines.


• Haskell book to read and buy. Luckily in that order.


• SemWeb project VoiD a simple vocabulary for linking and describing different data sets.


• A couple of ways of fixing the billion dollar mistake using Java Rebel or maybe Maybe Monad (using Java 5 for loops even). Speaking of which: Monoid fingertree (trees in Haskell) and JQuery is a Monad (apparently that makes it slow). I also realized that Void is a valid type in Java Generics which is helpful in the dreaded Visitor pattern.


• Bill Moyers on Gaza and Dr Izzeldine Abuelaish sharing his grief on Israeli television. More information is available from ABC's Foreign Correspondent story, "The Doctor and his Daughters" because the wikipedia page has been deleted.


• The Poppendieck's on Lean development as to balance Martin Fowler on Scrum.


• Straight Skeleton as a way to generate a skeleton from a polygon.


• RESTEasy JBoss' REST framework.


• Microsoft's terrible vengence, Songsmith. If you love music don't click here.


• And What's up for Java in 2009?

Things I've Read

* Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory related to Boing Boing's $250,000 Intelligent Design challenge (UPDATED: $1 million) and Flying Spaghetti Monster.
* JUnit-Addons and GSBase so at least only two software projects have to reinvent the wheel.
* Non-blocking Data Sharing in Multiprocessor Real-Time Systems "In this paper, we present an efficient non-blocking solution to the general readers/writers inter-task communication problem our solution allows any arbitrary number of readers and writers to perform their respective operations."
* Why I Prefer SOA to REST "The problem is that although it is easy to model resources as services as shown in the example in many cases it is quite difficult to model a service as a resource. For example, a service that validates a credit card number can be modeled as a validateCreditCardNumber(string cardNumber) service. On the other hand it is unintuitive how one would model the service as a resource. For this reason I prefer to think about distributed applications in terms of services as opposed to resources." Now people can just argue about what is intuitive (credit card gateways on the Web existed before SOAP - must have been REST I guess).
* I Need a New Language: Rel? "I want a language for table programming. I think you can write programs in this language that do everything we expect of an application programming language -- building GUIs, reacting to mouse events, listening to sockets -- everything. Don't model your domain as objects. Model it as relations...I can imagine programs that have a relvar (Date's term for a relational variable: essentially a table or a view) for MouseState."
* Package Scoping And Unit Testing "Package scoping particularly shines during unit testing. Some programmers argue that you should only test through the public API. Don't be silly. Limiting your tests to the public API contradicts the spirit of unit testing and subjects you to unnecessary dependency pain. I prefer to isolate and limit the amount of code I test at one time, and test as close to the code as possible." Somewhat related, JSR 277 - Java Module System
* Web as Platform Mash-Ups "There have been a lot of excellent posts and articles this week about APIs, the Web as Platform, web sites as software companies, and so forth..."
* Ruby, Python, "Power" "There are different opinions on the relative power of Ruby and Python. I'm not much more authoritative than other resources (though I'm not less authoritative either; most comparisons between the two languages are flawed). Ultimately I don't believe there are many (any?) places where one language is more "powerful" than the other (and not just in the "they are both Turing complete" sense)"