JEEConf 2016 - Day 1

First impressions.

Environment

Place for conference is much better than we had last year. Now trip from stage to stage takes no more than one minute. It's very good for those who chose wrong talk.

Lunch in boxes is a cool idea. No queues for lunch at all this time. However portions are abit smaller. But you can take some extra snacks anywhere, so it's not a minus.

Speeches

There where interesting and not interesting speeches for me. I've got great insights regarding Spark and Scala. BigData processing is mainstream now.

Also speech about JUnit 5 was very interesting. I believe I've got whole idea of JUnit 5. Alot of valuable things coming there.

Entertaiments from sponcors

Not as much as last year.

This day buzzwords

spark, scala, kotlin

Opensource development ecosystem

 My aim was to have compleatly free development ecosystem for one project. Since this is java project I whanted to have java ecosystem. As a source control system was choosen git and that's why project was hosted at github (you know where it is so I don't put link here).

I start looking for free CI service. First I found Travis-CI but to maintain build there I have to make additional file in my repository (but at that time I was a bit lazy to do so). Fortunally I found another service. It's BuildHive from Cloudbees (and here is the link https://buildhive.cloudbees.com/). This service is based on Jenkins-CI and it was first plus. The second plus was the way to configure build. Actually you don't need to configure build, just type shell comands to build project ant that's it. 

EnvMan4J

Short story 

Recently I evaluated couple of code generation Java frameworks and I faced with one interesting issue. Every framework or application server wants to have XXX_HOME variable and %XXX_HOME%/bin element in a path variable.
I dreamed about tool that do such thing for a long time. And now I decided to write it. I choose Lazarus to write this tool because it must be native application (in case I need to set JAVA_HOME ;) ). Now this program works fine with Windows (I have only one open issue). Hope I will also make Linux version.

Where to get

You may get this application from my github https://github.com/crc83/EnvMan4J

Case study

I made short screen cast because it's better to see once than to hear many times. You may find it here

ZKoss UI testing experience

Recently I had experience of developing small set of web applications for internal use. These applications were based on ZKoss AJAX UI framework. During development me and my teammates realized that we need set of UI test just because it easier and faster to test our work automatically than manually.

To solve this issue I take a look at Selenium. We realized that we can’t test ZKoss applications by Selenium itself; we need some additions because id’s of UI elements have been generated automatically by ZKoss (see presentation about it at slideshare and video (Ukrainian language) here ).

Fortunately ZK team have made testing framework on the top of Selenium to test their components. So I made a fork of this framework at github and modified it for our purposes (instead of component testing our team needed to make an integration tests).

So we received an ability to locate UI elements by different parameters. We choose next sets of parameters for this purpose:

1. ZKoss element id (not an javascript id)
2. ZKoss element type and caption (i.e. @menu[label=”File”])
3. ZKoss element type, caption and modal form on which it located (i.e. @window[title=”Error”] @button[label=”Close”])

All these approaches works fine at the moment.

Also we have some issues:

1. With two similar applications we have different behavior of internet explorer WebDriver (it’s related to issue http://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=2247). With one application we see unnecessary scrollbar and with other we don’t see it.
2. We still can’t run htmlunit tests with our application.
3. We still can’t run component tests with ZTL-2 and this will be subject of future investigation.

P.S. Also there is a brunch at ZKoss forum related to subject http://www.zkoss.org/forum/listComment/17556-ZTL-issues