Last Øredev I were at a presentation done by Robert Martin, author of the book Clean Code. I were really impressed by what his message where. So we are trying to follow his word at work and today a topic came up. So a colleague had this code:


public String getRequestString() throws MQException {
String request = "";
request += Helper.leftRightFilled(true, String.valueOf(getSessionNumberAndIncreaseIt()), '0', 3);
request += Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getVersion(), '0', 3);
request += Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getTransaction(), 'X', 4);
request += Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getLanguage(), 'X', 2);
request += Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getCallersPhoneNumber(), '0',16);
request += Helper.leftRightFilled(false, dynamicSettingMQ.getCustomerNumber(), ' ', 16);
request += Helper.leftRightFilled(true, String.valueOf(dynamicSettingMQ.getNumberOfUnsucceededCalls()), '0', 3);
return request;
}


I intermediately though that could be more readable, so I just pushed a lot into functions, and did a little to the helper class:

public String getRequestString() throws MQException {
String request = "";
request += createSessionNumberString();
request += createVersionString();
request += createTransactionString();
request += createLanguageString();
request += createCallersPhoneNumberString();
request += createCustomerNumberString();
request += createNumberOfUnsucceededCallsString();
return request;
}
protected String createCallersPhoneNumberString() throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getCallersPhoneNumber(), '0', 16);
}
protected String createCustomerNumberString() throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(false, dynamicSettingMQ.getCustomerNumber(), ' ', 16);
}
protected String createLanguageString() throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getLanguage(), 'X', 2);
}
protected String createNumberOfUnsucceededCallsString() throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(true, dynamicSettingMQ.getNumberOfUnsucceededCalls(), '0', 3);
}
protected String createSessionNumberString() throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getSessionNumberAndIncreaseIt(),'0', 3);
}
protected String createTransactionString() throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getTransaction(), 'X', 4);
}
protected String createVersionString() throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getVersion(), '0', 3);
}
}


At first the colleague thought it was nice, but then remembered he really needed a overview of locations used in the string manipulation. So a thing between the two are needed:

public String getRequestString() throws MQException {
String request = "";
request += createSessionNumberString('0', 3);
request += createVersionString('0', 3);
request += createTransactionString('X', 4);
request += createLanguageString('X', 2);
request += createCallersPhoneNumberString('0', 16);
request += createCustomerNumberString(' ', 16);
request += createNumberOfUnsucceededCallsString('0', 3);
return request;
}
protected String createCallersPhoneNumberString(char fillWith, int length) throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getCallersPhoneNumber(), fillWith,length);
}
protected String createCustomerNumberString(char fillWith, int length) throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(false, dynamicSettingMQ.getCustomerNumber(), fillWith,length);
}
protected String createLanguageString(char fillWith, int length) throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getLanguage(), fillWith,length);
}
protected String createNumberOfUnsucceededCallsString(char fillWith, int length) throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(true, dynamicSettingMQ.getNumberOfUnsucceededCalls(), fillWith,length);
}
protected String createSessionNumberString(char fillWith, int length) throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getSessionNumberAndIncreaseIt(),fillWith,length);
}
protected String createTransactionString(char fillWith, int length) throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getTransaction(), fillWith,length);
}
protected String createVersionString(char fillWith, int length) throws MQException {
return Helper.leftRightFilled(true, getVersion(), fillWith, length);
}


Im not satisfied, but not sure it can be done more clean? And if you are wondering about why we are doing all this string manipulation, we are working with some legacy MQ. If we split up the code without parameters as above we lose the quick overview.. But could the code be simplified even more please come with your suggestion..

Seems like gremlins in my machine, first time we at work did a branch the branch received changes from trunk. But did not push stuff back to trunk. Merging was simple since the branch always was up to date with trunk and only had a few changes..

Some time passed and we tried doing a new branch, a few problems, but at last we finally made the branch. Worked with it, but now subversive and tortoise refuses to merge the branch back again! I’ve tried a million things. In the end I checked out trunk removed the affected parts and added the ones from the branch and commitet those again. Just to get our system into working order..

My primary suspicion now are that doing branches are very affected by which svn provider you chose, nothings confirmed, but I know we’ve switched providers since the first successful branching.

Any other experiencing troubles with this ancient version of eclipse & subversive?

Ever tired of using endless hours of css’ing just to find out that what you did breaks in IE.. WicketStuff Artwork is all about making your wicket site turn into art, easy. It’s a package consisting of two modules

1. Liquid
2. NiftyCornersCube

Both modules will let you do round corners on containers simple and easy, just add a behavior to your wicket component or your page and thats it.
Liquid will let you do all sorts of advanced stuff with your markup containers, for example add a shadowed border, see this screenshot:

Liquid Examples

NiftyCornersCube are really quick to render and requires less cpu processing so it has some advantages but are also very limited in effects. See here:

Nifty Examples

You can grab the latest snapshot release here:
http://wicketstuff.org/maven/repository/org/wicketstuff/artwork/1.4-SNAPSHOT/

And see howto checkout the examples here:
http://wicketstuff.org/confluence/display/STUFFWIKI/Wiki

Basically it’s just this svn url:
http://wicket-stuff.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wicket-stuff/trunk/wicketstuff-core/artwork-parent/artwork-examples
But you should check out the whole wicketstuff core in order to build dependencies.

Now please come with more ideas and JS libs to add to the Artwork package I want to see some comments on how to improve it

Regards Nino

Hi you might want to upgrade your disk from time to time, so you either need to clone or ghost it. Heres how I do it.

First prepare the disk with the GUI tool gparted. I like to have a few partitions, one for winblows, one for winblows games, one for ubuntu and one ext3 for storage.

Then copy your system (remember not to have too many apps open at this time wierd stuff could happen once you start up the other disk)
Open a terminal and write:

sudo rsync -a -x --exclude /media/newdisk / /media/newdisk

Make grub active on the new disc, in the same terminal or another write:

grub> setup (hd0) (hd0,0)

Which installs grub into the MBR of hd0 (hda) using the boot files that were already in /boot on hd0,0 (hda1).

Now you can do "kernel (hd0," and then tab in the grub command line to find partitions. Once you identify your drive you should also be able to do the math for the partition.

Okay almost done, now we have to go edit the grub menu.list located under the /boot folder of the new disk, ubuntu are using uuids to identify partitions. So it’s time to open gparted again, remember that we did it the last time from a terminal, we do the same thing again “sudo gparted”, and find the partition where you copied the system to and then right click and press info now theres a field called uuid, copy paste those into the appropriate of the menulist like here :

example

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
uuid 49753240-3c10-4fdb-a624-6b07b5071d09
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=49753240-3c10-4fdb-a624-6b07b5071d09 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet

title Windows XP Home
uuid 4D9D89C529CA8435
makeactive
chainloader +1


So before wiping the old disk I suggest that you try booting the new one, just in case something went wrong. I had no troubles with it, but it’s always nice to have a backup.. Most motherboards today have a option to boot from different disks.

I’ve used this blog here as source http://encodable.com/tech/blog/2006/10/30/Ubuntu_Linux_Hard_Drive_Upgrade
as well as this one http://samuelcheng.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/transferring-ubuntu-to-new-harddrive/

My solution was to run this small tool :

luvcview -f yuv -l


I have a creative live im ultra.. Works like a charm.. Now if I could only get my twin display working when I play games!

So you are developing with the Nortel SCE and want todo integration testing. Theres no support for it in the framework itself. So we think and think. The SCE communicates via voicexml or VXML towards the MPS. This happens over http protocol, that means the we can use Jmeter to sniff the communication between MPS and SCE (JBOSS / struts). So in practice to make this work you need to setup the http proxy on jmeter and then go into the SBClient.cfg located here : C:\Program Files\Nortel Networks\SelfService\PERIvxml\config\ on a standard installation , edit these two lines:


client.inet.proxyServer VXIString localhost
client.inet.proxyPort VXIInteger 9000

Proxy server are the machine where you have jmeter running and port are the one you specified when setting up the proxy, id recommend using 9000 since the default 8080 clashes with the SCE Jboss port. After changing the parameters you need to restart the MPS service.

So there are two was of recording, on your local machine using the mock interface provided with SCE / eclipse ( execution view / WVADS ). Or on your test facility where you actually can dial in as normal, and record the scenarios. Just remember when you end Jmeter the proxy goes down aswell, meaning the MPS & SCE can no longer communicate, just comment out the 2 lines in sbclient.cfg to get it working again.

Tips

1. Remember to switch recording controller in jmeter between scenarios. And one more thing this will only record the dialog between SCE and MPS, not the audio server.
2. If you add appropriate listeners to your jmeter scenario when you replay you can even see the vxml responses.

Heres how a scenario from a very simple application looks (Just playing a couple of prompts):

SCE Jmeter Scenario

After recording the scenarios they can now be replayed at wish for example as part of integration test. In the next part I’ll try to digest howto put in test coverage with coberatura, so we get some metrics on how much of our code actually are tested with this approach. Now sadly since SCE does a lot of auto generation I think the process will be partially manual, so we cannot employ a building server like Hudson for this:( If you have any ideas on howto run the SCE auto generation as a MOJO from maven or something please do not hesitate to write. As always comments are more than welcome

If you are new to jmeter you can read more here, Jmeter site

In late 2008 I got the permission (by signing a contract) from ASF to create and run a Webshop that sells Wicket Merchandise, the shop donates 5% of profit to ASF the rest goes to the Wicket community. If you want to buy some merchandise go here http://www.cafepress.com/apachewicket .

The Apache Wicket Merchandise Shop has awarded these people:

• 2009 – Jeremy Thomerson , for his work organizing wicketstuff core, he got golf t-shirt ( http://www.cafepress.com/apachewicket.317295373 )
• 2009 – Daan van Etten , for creating the grapichs for the merchandise, he got the mug ( http://www.cafepress.com/apachewicket.317295372 )

The idea are to continue to use profits to award people that has done something special for the wicket community, like Wicket committers or WicketStuff committers etc.

If you have someone that you would like to nominate to receive some merchandise please write it as a comment here, please write a few lines why and if you have contact information you can mail it too me. I’ll add them to the vote list.

regards Nino

So I wanted to put in a conditional css thing to fix a IE problem, todo this thing in wicket I just though up a way. And wrote the code, it just worked:)

Heres how:
Markup (in head):

*style wicket:id="ieStyle" type="text/css"*

A simple webmarkupcontainer, to put in the hack (with a resource reference)::

add(new WebMarkupContainer("ieStyle"){

}

And to finish it up make it conditional so only IE picks it up, by adding a behavior:

public class IECheckBehaviorBehavior extends AbstractBehavior {
public IECheckBehaviorBehavior() {
}
@Override
public void beforeRender(Component component) {
super.beforeRender(component);
Response response = component.getResponse();
response.write("*!--[if lt IE 7]>--*");
}
@Override
public void onRendered(Component component) {
super.onRendered(component);
Response response = component.getResponse();
response.write("*![endif]--*");
}
}


The result:

*!--[if lt IE 7]>--*
body {behavior: url(resources/zeuzgroup.web.page.BasePage/csshover2.htc;jsessionid=1pjzdpc4j8asn);}
*![endif]--*


Simple and and almost clean

Ps I had to substitute the less than equal and greater than equal sign with *

So what’s the fuss about openID? Well the idea are to have one id provider for all the sites that require authentication.

And if you go a bit further and you do at sometime, you’ll want to get some details about the user, like email or full name. So the guys at openID implemented something called attribute exchange. And if you are in the java world like I am you want something simple, so I turned to openID4Java. The idea are that you let the user put in the id on your web page just something like johndoe.openid.org and then you forward the user to openid.org and lets openid.org validate your user and then openid.org will forward the user back to you using an url you specified. And if you really need some properties, you can add a sreg (OpenID Simple Registration Extension) for each property to make the user enter it at the provider ( however not all providers supports these things ).

Well onto the code :

Code for requesting the provider

// --- placing the authentication request ---
public String authRequest(String userSuppliedString,
HttpServletRequest httpReq, HttpServletResponse httpResp,
String returnToUrl) throws IOException, ServletException {
try {
// configure the return_to URL where your application will receive
// the authentication responses from the OpenID provider

return null;
}


The code that recieves the response from the provider:

// --- processing the authentication response ---
public User verifyResponse(HttpServletRequest httpReq) {
try {
// extract the parameters from the authentication response
// (which comes in as a HTTP request from the OpenID provider)
ParameterList response = new ParameterList(httpReq
.getParameterMap());

}


So the idea are good and the authentication works, but my problem are that I cannot get the providers to provide the ax properties. So I’ll be following up on howto do this in this post. I hope I succeed at some point, because for me openid without ax are almost worthless. At this point I dont know if it’s the openID4java implementation or the openID providers. If you have any pointers on howto do this please comment

So I’ve added a few things and done a cleanup on the Wicketstuff OpenLayers integration.

• We are now using JTS (http://www.vividsolutions.com/Jts/JTSHome.htm) directly.
• You are now able to draw geometry’s using the new DrawListenerBehavior
  • Geom’s are pushed to java using JTS
• Remove the drawControl using the RemoveDrawControl behavior.

Heres some screens :

Drawing

FeedBack from serverside (just outputting the WKT of the geom)

Using a little JTS:

And if you’re wondering why is this cool? Well because above interactions are passed to server side, using the Wicketstuff Openlayers integration requires no knowledge of javascript, its wrapped nicely for you.

Heres the link to a little more about the library:

http://wicketstuff.org/confluence/display/STUFFWIKI/wicket-contrib-openlayers

And if you combine this with hibernate spatial, you can since hibernate spatial supports JTS.. You have a really cool simple GIS system