A Java geek

Starting with Cucumber for end-to-end testing

This week, my team decided to create a smoke test harness around our web app to avoid the most stupid regressions. I was not in favor of that, because of my prior experience with the fragility of end-to-end testing. But since we don’t have enough testers on our team, that was the only sane thing to do.

Java

Performance cost of reflection

In Java, it’s widely admitted that reflection - usage of the java.reflect API, comes at a high cost in terms of performance. Older Java versions had huge performance overhead, while it seems that newer versions bring it in the acceptable range. But what does 'acceptable' really mean? This is the question I asked when commenting on a performance review that advised to replace code based on reflection by standard code.

Development

You don't talk about refactoring club

The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. I guess the same could be said about refactoring. That would first requires to define what I mean by refactoring in the context of this post.

Development

Scala vs Kotlin: Operator overloading

This is the 2nd post in the Scala vs. Kotlin focus series. Last week, I started my comparison of Scala and Kotlin with the Pimp my library pattern. In the second part of this serie, I’d like to address operator overloading.

Development

Scala vs Kotlin: Pimp my library

This is the 1st post in the Scala vs. Kotlin focus series. I’ve been introduced to the world of immutable data structures with the Scala programming language - to write I’ve been introduced to the Functional Programming world would sound too presumptuous.

Technical

Fixing floating-point arithmetics with Kotlin

This week saw me finally taking time to analyze our code base with Sonar. In particular, I was made aware of plenty of issues regarding floating-point arithmetics. Fun with Java’s floating-point arithmetics Those of you who learned Java in an academic context probably remember something fishy around FP arithmetics. Then if you never used them, you probably forgot about them. Here’s a very quick example of interesting it turns out to be: double a = 5.8d; double b = 5.

Java

Comparing Lombok and Kotlin

I know about Lombok since a long time, and I even wrote on how to create a new (at the time) @Delegate annotation. Despite this and even though I think it’s a great library, I’ve never used it in my projects. The reason for this mostly because I consider setting up the Lombok agent across various IDEs and build tools too complex for my own taste in standard development teams.

Java

Faster Mutation Testing

As an ardent promoter of Mutation Testing, I sometimes get comments that it’s too slow to be of real use. This is always very funny as it also applies to Integration Testing, or GUI. Yet, this argument is only used againt Mutation Testing, though it cost nothing to setup, as opposed to the former. This will be the subject of another post. In this one, I will provide proposals on how to speed up mutation testing, or more precisely PIT, the Java Mutation Testing reference.

Development

Smart logging in Java 8 and Kotlin

Logging is a not a sexy subject but it’s important nonetheless. In the Java world, logging frameworks range from Log4J to SLF4J via Commons Logging and JDK logging (let’s exclude Log4J 2 for the time being). Though different in architecture and features, all of their API look the same. The logger has a method for each log level e.g.: debug(String message)info(String message)error(String message)etc. Levels are organized into a hierarchy.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog