New to Capistrano? Read my previous and more introductory blog post on Capistrano – Remote builds with Capistrano. Are you using Capistrano and are confused why the user environment, the PATH for example, is different from when you log on to your server via SSH? Perhaps you have failed to use RVM or other user [...]

Capistrano is a very nice open source tool for executing commands on one or multiple remote servers via SSH. Capistrano is written in Ruby and uses a rake-like DSL for its tasks. Its main use is to deploy web applications, Rails in particular, but it may be used for much more. Want to try? It’s [...]

Working as a consultant, it is not unusual that I am referred to customer specific software environment with regard to computers, operating systems, networks and other configurations. However, since I work with Java, most tools are available online and they can easily be downloaded and installed on different platforms. IntelliJ IDEA is no exception, but [...]

Users and testers will find bugs you are sure you have already fixed. Sometimes they use the wrong version, sometimes your fix is not as good as you thought. Either way a tiny unique version number visible in the app can save you hours of work. Incrementing the version number of your project for every [...]

Continuos Integration is the practice of integrating changes from many people as often as possible. Instead of merging changes once a month and spending time handling merge errors you try integrate every day, perhaps even every hour. Each integration is built and tested on a server. If there are build errors or test failures, you [...]

There are a few simple steps to get nice graphic presentations of FindBugs results using Maven.

First, to enable FindBugs reporting in Maven, just add report section to your pom files, something like example below, but of course, you can do your own configuration.

I’m going to guess that most of you know what instrumentation is. In the event that you don’t, instrumentation is a feature in which specific monitoring of the interactions between an application and the system is made possible. Instrumentation also makes it possible to write test cases that interact with the application. The problem with [...]

Some of you may remember the article, by Bruce Tate, Don’t Make Me Eat the Elephant Again. It was an article about EJB, and Bruce was begging Sun not to make the same mistakes with EJB3 as they had done with EJB, and EJB2. They didn’t, Spring came along as better alternative and forced EJB3 [...]

Problem When working on www.beertoplist.com I ran into a Maven problem, that is fairly common: Having a project that should be configured differently for different environments. That is for instance you want one configuration for development, one for test and one for production. I wanted a solution that allowed me to make changes to all [...]

Test Driven Development, or TDD for short, is a simple software development practice where unit tests, small focused test cases, drive the development forward. This is most easily explained by the Three Rules of TDD that dictate the following: You are not allowed to write any production code unless it is to make a failing [...]

Background In PowerMock we’re using a custom classloader to byte-code manipulate classes that are normally not mockable to make them mockable. But when running a test case there may be some cases when the user needs to byte-code manipulate a certain class (X) in the first test method but needs to have the class unmodified [...]

When you clone a git repository, everything is automatically setup to allow you to fetch, pull, push to and from the remote repository, origin. But what is really going on? git remote is configured with a few lines of configuration in the config file inside the .git/ directory. Here’s how it works: Create a new [...]

I was attending the “The Productive Programmer: Mechanics” session, held by Neal Ford, at Oredev last week and I wanted to share one trick that will more or less force you to get faster when developing in Eclipse. The Eclipse plug-in MouseFeed, written by Andriy Palamarchuk, will repeatedly nag you with what keyboard shortcuts you [...]

Today I was trying to setup the Android SDK (version 1.6_r1) on the 64 bit version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). After having installed the ADT Eclipse plugin and pointed out the Android SDK directory in the settings I immediately ran into the following error: Failed to get the adb version: Cannot run program “/home/johan/devtools/android/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.6_r1/tools/adb”: [...]

Since I’ve started doing some stuff in Grails lately I’ve virtually been forced to start looking for an alternative IDE. I’ve been an Eclipse guy for the last five years or so; ever since I got out of the JBuilder swamp. Unfortunately, the only IDE with decent support for Grails seems to be Idea (yes [...]