A new step for TestNG

A few minutes ago we have announced the new version of TestNG. The list of new features is published on Cedric's announcement.
I must mention the new types of @Configurations: before/afterSuite and before/afterTest. I intend to post a nice interaction of TestNG and DBUnit based on these.
The almost completely rewritten Ant task is bringing into scenes some important properties (attributes) that will allow you to use TestNG on daily builds and/or continuous integration.
Another thing that must be mentioned (big thanks to Hani and Patrick) is that TestNG has joined OpenSymphony (so we have a new forum, wiki and JIRA).
We hope that the experience is even better now and we are looking to hearing from you.

Keyboard adventures

My laptop doesn't have a right Control key. Even if this may seem not such a big problem, for me it is. I have instead 2 Win keys. So I have decided to change the right Win key to Control.
. Firstly, I have thought of using AutoHotKey as I am already using it for some other dirty nice stuff. The script looked pretty well imo: RWin:: { Send ,{Control Down} KeyWait, RWin Send ,{Control Up} } But after some testing I have found out that it is not correctly working (it seems it is emitting still another key event).
At this moment, I got back to Google and after looking for a couple of minutes I have reached this document from Microsoft. From the same page you will be able to download a document containing all the key codes too.
Following the document in a couple of minutes I got it working. Create a HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout registry key containing the needed mappings. Mine is: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 1D E0 5C E0 00 00 00 00.
Very neat! Yupee.

GMail - Don't throw anything away

Log in to your GMail account and than logout. Just look attentively at this message paragraph: Don't throw anything away. 2054.350xxxx megabytes (and counting). Exceptional!!!

NetBeans 4.1B - no multiple outdirs (yet)

Before installing Eclipse 3.1M6 milestone, I have played a little more with NetBeans. Next on my list were two important features I almost always need: multiple source directories with multiple output directories and various CVS access types.
While I was able to create multiple source directories immediately, I couldn't find a way to specify for each of them an output dir. Even if I have a project with my custom Ant build, NetBeans keeps on building all my classes into a build/classes dir under nbproject.
If anyone can point me to the right direction, this would be great. (tia).
Another thing that seemed to me pretty annoying was that after configuring multiple source directories Netbeans kept asking me the classpath for each source dir. But, I assume this is used for generating a javac task in the build.xml.
I think what I would really like to read now is some insights on the Netbeans project management and how it is using Ant. Maybe some of you already got this document/link and could share it with me. tia again.

Update: pls read attentively Jesse's comment on this entry. Insights from an "insider" [blink/].

Good feeling with NetBeans

I haven't been in a good working mood this evening. Waiting for Eclipse 3.1M6 to come out, but I guess tomorrow I will have it from a Ro FTP mirror.
So, remembering an old promise, I've jumped to NetBeans 4.1 beta.
The download is half of the size of Eclipse download (44M vs. 95M), the installation is smooth and ... here it is. Starting it with the default parameters (conf/netbeans.conf: -J-Xms32m -J-Xmx128m -J-XX:PermSize=32m -J-XX:MaxPermSize=96m -J-Xverify:none), NetBeans came up very quickly and even more... usable. I've started to have a good feeling about it.
I have found an import Eclipse project plugin, tried it with 2 or 3 projects and it worked nicely. Even better feelings. Than I was looking for various things I like in Eclipse (some of the views, code formatter, abbreviations). Some of them are there, others I couldn't find yet. I miss the multiple key shortcuts in some places, but I can get used with Netbean's ones. Being a customer of Jalopy (Hi Marco!), I didn't feel so bad without an advanced code formatter, but I think it would be necessary.
The next step: understand the way NetBeans manages projects. It is completely based on Ant. Either you write down your own - this allowing you to have a very customized project structure, or it will generate you one. Than you can trigger IDE actions like (Build, Run,) by associating the action with an Ant target. I haven't gonne to far with this yet, but I am sure I will, cause I've started to like it.
For the moment, this is all. No advanced features yet. The next day I will try to do my development with it just to get more in the mood.
Ah, not to forget. Thanks Petr Jiricka. You were right [blink/].

I got the feeling I know how I can do something in return for NetBeans, but I got to talk to Cedric firstly (my readers would probably imagine what I am thinking of [he-he/]).

Fine-grained transactions in Spring

In the previous post I have presented how an annotation-driven development session in Eclipse can be very simple. Today I will present a solution for fine-grained transactions with Spring.
Currently Spring supports different transaction management approaches:

• programmatic (through the direct usage of PlatformTransactionManager)
• declarative (through the usage of TransactionProxyFactoryBean and TransactionInterceptor)
• declarative transaction demarcation through source level metadata (based on commons-attributes and TransactionInterceptor)
• transaction demarcation based on real JDK1.5 annotations (I am not sure yet how they are working in background)

While for most of cases one of the above solutions should work, I wanted to have a solution that will allow me to exactly match the transactional methods (not implying some naming conventions as required by 2), not to be limitted on having all transactional methods declared as public and most important not to be based on proxies (some of the above solutions are based on interceptors which are in fact proxies, either normal or cglib proxies).
So my current solution is based on javadoc-like annotations and AspectWerkz taking into account that AspectWerkz allows the definition of pointcuts based on annotations (Note: the solution will work also with JDK1.5 annotations).
I have declared as in the previous post the Transaction interface, its corresponding annotation.properties and now I define the following aspect:
public class TransactionManagerAspect { /** * @Around(execution(@Transaction * *..*.*(..))) */ public Object executeInTransaction(final StaticJoinPoint sjp) throws Throwable { // implementation } }
The full implementation of TransactionManagerAspect is based on the logic of TransactionInterceptor and respectively TransactionAspectSupport.
To end up this short entry I will present the pros and cons (at least those i can see by myself):
Pros

• non-public methods are allowed to be marked in transactions
• more refined pointcut definition (no regex naming usage needed)

Cons:

• metadata bound to source code and not external
• post-compilation annotation processing (required only for the javadoc-like annotations)

All is left is to drive some small benchmark to see what is the time consumption on each of the above solutions.
If any of you is interested in the full code drop me a line and I will try to package the things for you.
By the way: this is not a Mardi Gras entry [blink/].