java

I just spent an hour playing with Groovy, and I have to say that it is very promising. I have not experimented a whole lot with the actual Groovy syntax, but based on what I have read as well as on my limited experiments, Groovy is a nice mixture of popular scripting languages such as Ruby or Python, but geared towards Java programmers. The syntax borrows many useful elements from other scripting elements but remains similar enough to Java to enable Java developers to easily learn this language....

Martin Fowler shares some thoughts on JUnit, mostly about why JUnit instantiates a new instance of the test class for each test case. As usual, he has some good points. The posting also contains some information on JUnit’s TestSetup feature, which allows several test cases to share a single setup and teardown routine.

Prevayler 2.0, a prevalent persistence engine, was released a few days ago. This is the first time I have heard about this project or about this type of persistence engine, but it sounds very promising. Prevayler can be used in lieu of a (relational or object-oriented) database in many cases. It is based on simple mechanisms that are built into the Java language, in particular serialization. The idea is that the engine tracks and logs any changes in (due to commands being run on) your business objects....

I’m still evaluating Eclipse 3.0 to see if I could imagine switching from IntelliJ IDEA to Eclipse. Overall, I’m still pretty impressed with Eclipse, with the exception of a few shortcomings I mentioned before. Another important feature that Eclipse lacks out of the box is support for XML editing. I find this somewhat surprising, as pretty much any Java project these days involves XML files (just think about XML config files as used by Struts and other frameworks, or even the web....

EclipseME is an Eclipse plugin for J2ME development. I have not installed it yet, but it sounds well worth checking out. Here are some of its features: In my initial J2ME experiments about half a year ago, I was quite happy with the combination of IntelliJ IDEA and the Antenna Ant task for J2ME. While it would be nice to be able to do certain J2ME specific tasks directly within the IDE, being able to build the application from Ant is indispensable, in my opinion....