Windows Power Shell

As a linux user, I had always been frustrated that I must use a stupid command line to perform some task under windows. Or even worse, there were a lot of tasks I could even perform like that, because the commandline did not have any grep, find, and similar utilities.

This is until I discovered the powershell. Since I have to use windows at work and sometimes I do not even have the possibilty to use cygwin with suitable tools. I really got frustrated. But now that I looked into many of the power shell language, I must admit that it is quite impressive, what one can do with it. I also find it great that the powershell understands both pipes and objects...

I will probably add here many of the useful features I discovered. In someway I think Microsoft understood that they had to become more competitive in order to keep their customers.

GWT, SmartGWT and Testing

Automated testing is very useful, and would be even more useful, if it was much more easy. It seems though that the testing frameworks for web application as still not yet part of the tool box of web application developpers.

I hope this will help me to implement automated testing of web application.

I did some research on testing of GWT. It seems that it is possible to use selenium for GWT and for smart gwt. I must really get to this quickly.

CRISP Builds

For build architectures, it is useful to use a CRISP build:

• Complete (recipe lists all ingredients)
• Repeatable (version control time machine)
• Informative (radiate valuable information)
• Schedulable (complete and repeatable)
• Portable (machine-independent)

In the latest project for which I worked we use a continuous integration system.
At some point, it can be annoying because we do receive a lot of uninteresting mails.
But once configured it is really good to insure quality and reproducable results.

As a developer, I know how easy it is to deploy something on the server,
which is not exactly what is on the server.

Performance in Java

For diverse purposes I wanted to take a look at performance benchmarks for diverse implementations of collections.

I came to the following free book: Java Performace Book

Moreover, for a project for which I am working we will be do performance measures in order to choose the best infrastructure
for our project. We will do some profiling using JETM or using JProfiler depending on which gives the best infrastructure for our goal.