Few notes on two approaches to testing. Some people seem to be more interested in verification, others aim for better design.

A short comparison of length of the build files of Maven 3, Polyglot Maven (Groovy version), Ant and Gradle. Please notice that this is NOT a full comparison of these build frameworks!

I spent last few days searching for tools that would facilitate process of writing few articles using Docbook. I analyzed few solutions - mainly XMLmind XML Editor, Vim with various plugins and Asciidoc. This post presents the result of this research.

While preparing for Javarsovia 2010 Gradle speech I tried to list all things that are performed during builds. I remembered few last projects of mine and tried to categorize various actions that happen during their build. The result surprised me - seems like today's builds do a lot of very different stuff.

If you are interested in slides (in polish) and source code of
Gradle presentation that I gave during Java Camp #3 (10 April 2010,
Cracow, Poland) you will find them here.

If you happen to be in Cracow (Poland) this Saturday (10 April 2010) and you know polish :) you might be interested in attending the Java Camp #3 conference. See http://www.java.pl/?p=138 for detailed agenda.

I'm happy to announce that I will give a talk on Gradle at 11 am. I have 1,5 hour to present Gradle and show how it compares to Ant/Maven. My plan is to show a lot of code to present how Gradle can solve real-life scenarios ...and bash Ant/Maven along the way ;).

Hope you will be there !

This is a continuation of the post devoted to some code smells that was vigorously commented in favour of ugly, anti-OO code design :). Thanks God, I also got an interesting question regarding this problem.

Seems to me, that this topic should be discussed one more time.

This is a part of "Ant/Gradle/Maven comparison" series.

A common task during development is the creation of an installable version of software. The one I mention in this post is a real one - this is something I've been working working with since few months. It does few things related to Fuse ESB:

• unpacks Fuse sources,
• updates some config files,
• retrieves few JARs from Maven repository and put them into deploy folder,
• does some more file-related stuff - creates directories and copies files,
• produces ready-to-unpack-and-use file: tar.gz (for Linux) and zip (for Windows).

I started to write this with Ant/Maven, and then switched to Gradle. I'll present few code snippets here, that should give you a decent understanding of difference that Gradle makes. Please judge for yourself if the switch from Ant/Maven to Gradle was worth the effort.

Is test-first better than test-last ? Is there a significant difference in the quality of code developed using these approaches ? It's hard to say for sure. My gut feeling (and experience) tells me that test-first is superior. Sometimes I find evidences for this claim. Like the one I present in this blog post.

So you decided to check some build prerequisites before doing any real job. You want to check if proper Java version is installed, if some configuration files are available etc.

I'll show you how you can do this using Ant, Gradle and Maven.