Pencils Down

This weblog is about my experiences in software development

Browsing Posts tagged Software Tools

Working with a client where the designer they hired produced a nice looking design.  However, even though promising to just use standard fonts there are a couple of very conspicuous parts of the design that use non-standard fonts.  Sound familiar?

Google to the rescue! (I don’t know how they control what people spend time/money developing)  I saw a reference to Google Fonts in a HN post the other day.  What’s that?

Google Web Fonts provides high-quality web fonts that you can include in your pages using the Google Web Fonts API.

Just like everything else you can use google for, (especially CDN access to includes and the like) you can make reference to some non-standard font in the Google font set and then use it pretty much like any other font in CSS (have to quote the font name versus plain text(=standard font)).  Again, with their simple example:

<html>

<head>

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine”>

<style>

body {

font-family: ‘Tangerine’, serif;

font-size: 48px;

}

</style>

</head>

<body>

<div>Making the Web Beautiful!</div>

</body>

</html>

So, next time you are graced with a design present you can just smile.

http://www.chengyinliu.com/whatfont.html

Simple: point and click

Codify is used to develop apps for the iPad on the iPad!  The integration of touch with the editor is astounding.  If only Eclipse did something even close to this for us mere mortals…

Oh, I forgot, one more thing: price is $7.99.

Neato company has a patent pending process for re-compressing JPEG files. Looks like 75% or better reduction in size for average JPEGS with no loss. Hopefully companies like GIMP will sign up.

http://www.jpegmini.com/main/home

EasyMock, like other JUnit mock testers, allows you to set expectations for method calls on the mocked object.  However, the expect() method wants to see a return type from the method call.  So, what to do?

A built-in mechanism of EasyMocks is to just “call” the void method in question.  For example a commonly mocked object is the HttpSession:

    expect(request.getSession()).andReturn(session);
    expect(session.getAttribute(name)).andReturn(null);
    session.setAttribute(eq(name), isA(InSession.class));
    replay(session);
    //whatever you are really trying to test
    verify(session);

Could only be easier if the doc told you this clearly.

WebDAV Rules

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I guess I have been living under a rock for several years and never noticed WebDAV.  Or maybe I heard about it and thought yet-another-web-standard.  WebDAV is Distributed Authoring and Versioning.  Techie speak for keeping versions of stuff on a simple web server.  Yes, just builds on top of everyday HTTP.  It’s everywhere: Microsoft SharePoint, several hundred independent share-ware vendors, and more than a few version control systems use it as a base.

Of course you need something to talk to the server.  Click on a document under WebDAV control and down comes the document with a MIME type.  If the associated editor is WebDAV-enabled it will take immediately attempt to talk back to the server to see if it is a WebDAV server.  Again, Microsoft to the rescue with the entire Office suite and many of your other favorites.

Then some smart guys looked at the V in WebDAV and decided to take a gamble.  Presto, a version control system sitting there with almost no work.  (Yes, I know there is more to it)

WebDAV should be a favorite of IT staff everywhere: they can toss whatever home-grown CMS that gives them nightmares and just install SharePoint.  I think MS is being treated as an enterprise player these days.  Maybe.

Lastly are the developer shops with a proprietary product that kinda, sorta does WebDAV things.  Maybe they have been living under a rock as well.  More likely the idea of ripping apart their product and replacing it with something from Microsoft gives them nightmares.

I think I need to look at job descriptions for other things that should be in my toolkit versus just keyword match on stuff I already know.

We are well into a coding phase.  The plan had been to get CruiseControl.  We definitely need some tool to automate the build, regression, unit test process.  Surprise, we aren’t getting CruiseControl, we are going to use Rational Build Forge.  Appears to be an pretty good product.  Lots of features, runs everywhere, etc…

My only qualm is we have been using ClearCase, another Rational product, for version control.  This has been less than stellar to the extreme issues of Blue Screens of Death during regular use.  Again, the Rational product versus Subversion, which I think the rest of the industry has been using without a hitch for years.

Just out of curiosity I poked at the pricing for Build Forge: $165,000 for the server and additional fees for groups of user licenses!

I was always curious how software tool companies have survived in this era of open source.  I think in most cases there is a good alternative free tool that probably works better (svn vs. clearcase, cruise control vs build forge, …)  Now it is clear:  The larger shops have bought into the commercial products over a period of many years and like anything else, are loathe to change the way they do business even though everyone involved probably agrees it would be a good idea to change.