Farewell WordPress, bonjour Hugo

Get know about my migration from WordPress to Hugo and the reasons behind it.

IMPORTANT. This blog has been archived. You may read an updated version of this post here.
Visit https://blog.solidsoft.pl/ to follow my new articles.

I started my technical blog at the end of 2010. The primary reason was a need to find a place to write about my tools, my ideas and spotted problems (or course with solutions to make life easier for others :-) ). I didn’t plan to write a lot and I accomplished that. By that 9+ years I published 61 posts – just ~6,5 per year, gaining popularity year by year.

The trends were changing over time. The number one for long time was posted in 2011 guide about improving the TestNG reporting with ReportNG. Next, it was Gradle and displaying dependencies in a multi-project build, followed by more compact Mockito with Java 8 and using Mockito with JUnit 5. I am also happy that people are looking for basic, but crutial topics such as importance of given-when-then in unit tests.

Coming back to the editorial things, initially, I chose WordPress as I was a popular FOSS solution with an ability to (optionally) make it self-hosted (as opposed to Blogger). It was possible to easily setup everything and to have a fully-fledged blog quickly. Thank you Automattic for that!

My blog has been always a side project to express myself and help others. As that, I would prefer to do not pay monthly subscription fee. In the free version wordpress.com has a few limitations. First of all, you cannot use your own domain. As a result even having redirects from your domain, most of the external sites link to wordpress.com and you do not fully control the content. Secondly, you are limited to the predefined themes and a level of its customization (e.g. CSS styles) is quite restricted. Thirdly, ads. Despite a clear “Occasionally, some of your visitors may see an advertisement here,” banner displayed to me, long time I wasn’t aware how it looks in practice (my hardened browser configuration limits it greatly). My visitors seeing that (different, possible targeted) ads on my blog could consider me as its source, which I didn’t like.

As hosting WordPress on my VPS could be challenging (I don’t know PHP, nor WP itself) and risky (it needs to be updated regularly due to detected security threats), I decided to go into static site generators (namely Hugo). Having initial configuration behind (which can take some time…, even with so nice and future rich theme as Zzo which in addition has a very friendly maintainer) it promises to be easy to maintain. In addition, it can be much easily hosted. Here, I chose Netlify which, in addition to a lot of interesting features, also provides great integration with the Git-based deployment workflow (blog as code). All at the cost of much harder integration with dynamic features (such as comments). There is a chance that I will write something some it in the future.

I have some ideas for (hopefully) interesting topics to cover. See you at my new blog!

P.S. As I don’t have an access to the list of subscribers, please subscribe to the new feed or the new email notifications in the new blog to get know what is going on here :-).

Automatically unrolling all parameterized Spock tests in the whole project

Would it be useful to unroll all parameterized Spock tests automatically?

I’ve been always frustrated with the need to add @Unroll annotation to every parameterized test/feature (or at least at the class/specification level) to make unrolling works in Spock. It was even worse to deal with the code with already missing @Unroll annotations and cryptic test results. For backward compatibility unrolling will rather not be enabled by default in the foreseeable future, but luckily there is a quick solution.

Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY 2.0

Unroll for all and for free

To enable global unrolling it is only required to add spock-global-unroll.jar to your classpath:

testCompile 'info.solidsoft.spock:spock-global-unroll:0.5.0'

To make it easier to use spock-global-unroll with different Spock versions (like 1.0-groovy-2.0 and 1.0-groovy-2.3) the plugin does not have the compile dependency on Spock and a proper spock-core jar has to be explicitly defined in a build configuration. E.g.:

testCompile 'info.solidsoft.spock:spock-global-unroll:0.5.0'
testCompile 'org.spockframework:spock-core:1.0-groovy-2.4'

That’s all. spock-global-unroll is a global extension which is activated automatically by Spock. All parameterized Spock tests are unrolled without the need to use @Unroll annotation.

Disabling automatic unrolling for a class

Automatic unrolling can be disabled for a particular class by putting @DisableGlobalUnroll on it.

The nice thing is that the @Unroll annotations manually placed at the test (feature) level can be used to unroll particular tests anyway (even if automatic unrolling has been disabled for given class).

@DisableGlobalUnroll
class PeselValidatorSpec extends Specification {

    //one big test for multiple input parameters
    def "should not be unrolled for some reasons PESEL #number"() { ... }

    (...)
}

Overriding default test name

To override default test name expanding (with #placeHolders in a test name) @Unroll annotation with a custom text can be used on the top of feature method or at the specification level.

@DisableGlobalUnroll
class PeselValidatorSpec extends Specification {

    //one big test for multiple input parameters
    def "should not be unrolled for some reasons PESEL #number"() { ... }

    //unrolled anyway
    @Unroll("PESEL '#pesel' should be #description")
    def "should validate PESEL correctness"() { ... }

    (...)
}

Summary

Being able to implement automatic tests unrolling within 15 minutes I decided to share it with the community – maybe there are others who don’t like to write boilerplate code :). The code written to achieve it has just a few lines of production code (of course there are also 3 test classes to verify if the extension works as expected :) ). This shows the power of Spock extensibility.

The complete source code is available from GitHub: https://github.com/szpak/spock-global-unroll

Update 20160521. I added automatic migration scripts in the project README to make a migration easier.

Btw, if you would like to find out more about “Interesting nooks and crannies of Spock” I will be speaking about them in May and June at GeeCON 2016 in Kraków, Gr8Conf 2016 in Copenhagen and Devoxx Poland again in Kraków.

Self promotion. Would you like to improve your and your team testing skills and knowledge of Spock quickly and efficiently? I conduct condensed (unit) testing training which you may find useful.

Using Mockito without static imports with Java 8

How to simplify Mockito usage by removing static imports in Java 8 based projects.

Rationale

Mockito API is based on static methods aggregated (mostly) in the (BDD)Mockito class followed by extremely fluent, chained method calls. Mock creation, stubbing and call verification can be initiated with mock/spy/given/then/verify static methods:

@Test
public void shouldVerifyMethodExecution() {
    //given
    TacticalStation tsSpy = BDDMockito.spy(TacticalStation.class);
    BDDMockito.willDoNothing().given(tsSpy).fireTorpedo(2);
    //when
    tsSpy.fireTorpedo(2);
    tsSpy.fireTorpedo(2);
    //then
    BDDMockito.then(tsSpy).should(BDDMockito.times(2)).fireTorpedo(2);
}

Quite verbose, but starting with Java 5 one can use static imports to simplify the code, but at the cost of additional static imports:

import static org.mockito.BDDMockito.then;
import static org.mockito.BDDMockito.willDoNothing;
import static org.mockito.BDDMockito.spy;
import static org.mockito.BDDMockito.times;
(...)

@Test
public void shouldVerifyMethodExecution() {
    //given
    TacticalStation tsSpy = spy(TacticalStation.class);
    willDoNothing().given(tsSpy).fireTorpedo(2);
    //when
    tsSpy.fireTorpedo(2);
    tsSpy.fireTorpedo(2);
    //then
    then(tsSpy).should(times(2)).fireTorpedo(2);
}

Imports can be hidden in IDE and usually do not disturb much. Nevertheless to be able to write just a method name (e.g. mock(TacticalStation.class)) without a class is it required to press ALT-ENTER (in IntelliJ IDEA) to add each static import on the first usage of a given method in a test class. The situation is even worse in Eclipse where it is required to earlier add BDDMockito to “Favorites” in “Content Assist” to make it suggested by IDE. Eclipse guys could say “you have to do it just once”, but as I experienced during my testing/TDD trainings it makes a Mockito learning (usage) curve a little bit steeper.

Of course there are some tricks like using star imports by default for Mockito classes to reduce number of required key strokes, but if you use Java 8 in your project (hopefully a majority of you) there is a simpler way to cope with it.

Static imports free approach

Mockito-Java8 2.0.0 (and its counterpart for Mockito 1.10.x – version 1.0.0) introduces a set of interfaces which provide all methods from Mockito API. By “implement” them in a test class all those methods become automatically directly accessible in written tests:

//no static imports needed!

public class SpaceShipTest implements WithBDDMockito {

    @Test
    public void shouldVerifyMethodExecution() {
        //given
        TacticalStation tsSpy = spy(TacticalStation.class);
        willDoNothing().given(tsSpy).fireTorpedo(2);
        //when
        tsSpy.fireTorpedo(2);
        tsSpy.fireTorpedo(2);
        //then
        then(tsSpy).should(times(2)).fireTorpedo(2);
    }
}

The code looks exactly like in the previous snippet, but there is not need to do any static import (besides a normal import of WithBDDMockito itself).

Under the hood the WithBDDMockito interface implementation is dead simple. All methods are default methods which just delegate to proper static method in BDDMockito class.

default <T> BDDMockito.BDDMyOngoingStubbing<T> given(T methodCall) {
    return BDDMockito.given(methodCall);
}

Flavors of Mockito

Mockito methods are provided by 3 base interfaces, being an entry points for given set of methods:
– WithBDDMockito – stubbing/mocking API in BDD style (provides also classic API).
– WithMockito – classic stubbing/mocking API
– WithAdditionalMatchers – additional Mokcito matchers (basic account are included in With(BDD)Mockito)

Summary

Java 8 has opened the new opportunities how (test) code can be written in more compact and readable way. Static imports free Mockito code can simplify writing tests a little bit, but there is more feature already available in Mockito-Java8 and even more to be included in Mockito 3.0 (those for which Mockito internals have to be modified in a non backward compatible way). Too take more ideas how code/projects can be refactored to benefit from Java 8 you can see my short presentation “Java 8 brings power to testing!” (slides and video).

Mockito-Java8 2.0.0-beta (for Mockito >=2.0.22-beta) and 1.0.0-beta (for Mockito 1.10.x and earlier betas of Mockito 2) is available through Maven Central. The versions should be pretty stable, but I would like to get wider feedback about this new feature, so it is labeled as beta. More details can be found on the project webpage.

Acknowledge. The idea was originally proposed by David Gageot (the guy behind Infinitest) in one of his blog posts.

More compact Mockito with Java 8, lambda expressions and Mockito-Java8 add-ons

Mockito-Java8 is a set of Mockito add-ons leveraging Java 8 and lambda expressions to make mocking with Mockito even more compact.

At the beginning of 2015 I gave my flash talk Java 8 brings power to testing! at GeeCON TDD 2015 and DevConf.cz 2015. In my speech using 4 examples I showed how Java 8 – namely lambda expressions – can simplify testing tools and testing in general. One of those tools was Mokcito. To not let my PoC code die on slides and to make it simply available for others I have released a small project with two, useful in specified case, Java 8 add-ons for Mockito.

Quick introduction

As a prerequisite, let’s assume we have the following data structure:

@Immutable
class ShipSearchCriteria {
    int minimumRange;
    int numberOfPhasers;
}

The library provides two add-ons:

Lambda matcher – allows to define matcher logic within a lambda expression.

given(ts.findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(
    argLambda(sc -> sc.getMinimumRange() > 1000))).willReturn(4);

Argument Captor – Java 8 edition – allows to use ArgumentCaptor in a one line (here with AssertJ):

verify(ts).findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(
    assertArg(sc -> assertThat(sc.getMinimumRange()).isLessThan(2000)));

Lambda matcher

With a help of the static method argLambda a lambda matcher instance is created which can be used to define matcher logic within a lambda expression (here for stubbing). It could be especially useful when working with complex classes pass as an argument.

@Test
public void shouldAllowToUseLambdaInStubbing() {
    //given
    given(ts.findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(
        argLambda(sc -> sc.getMinimumRange() > 1000))).willReturn(4);
    //expect
    assertThat(ts.findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(
        new ShipSearchCriteria(1500, 2))).isEqualTo(4);
    //expect
    assertThat(ts.findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(
        new ShipSearchCriteria(700, 2))).isEqualTo(0);
}

In comparison the same logic implemented with a custom Answer in Java 7:

@Test
public void stubbingWithCustomAsnwerShouldBeLonger() {  //old way
    //given
    given(ts.findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(any())).willAnswer(new Answer<Integer>() {
        @Override
        public Integer answer(InvocationOnMock invocation) throws Throwable {
            Object[] args = invocation.getArguments();
            ShipSearchCriteria criteria = (ShipSearchCriteria) args[0];
            if (criteria.getMinimumRange() > 1000) {
                return 4;
            } else {
                return 0;
            }
        }
    });
    //expect
    assertThat(ts.findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(
        new ShipSearchCriteria(1500, 2))).isEqualTo(4);
    //expect
    assertThat(ts.findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(
        new ShipSearchCriteria(700, 2))).isEqualTo(0);
}

Even Java 8 and less readable constructions don’t help too much:

@Test
public void stubbingWithCustomAsnwerShouldBeLongerEvenAsLambda() {  //old way
    //given
    given(ts.findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(any())).willAnswer(invocation -> {
        ShipSearchCriteria criteria = (ShipSearchCriteria) invocation.getArguments()[0];
        return criteria.getMinimumRange() > 1000 ? 4 : 0;
    });
    //expect
    assertThat(ts.findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(
        new ShipSearchCriteria(1500, 2))).isEqualTo(4);
    //expect
    assertThat(ts.findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(
        new ShipSearchCriteria(700, 2))).isEqualTo(0);
}

Argument Captor – Java 8 edition

A static method assertArg creates an argument matcher which implementation internally uses ArgumentMatcher with an assertion provided in a lambda expression. The example below uses AssertJ to provide meaningful error message, but any assertions (like native from TestNG or JUnit) could be used (if really needed). This allows to have inlined ArgumentCaptor:

@Test
public void shouldAllowToUseAssertionInLambda() {
    //when
    ts.findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(searchCriteria);
    //then
    verify(ts).findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(
        assertArg(sc -> assertThat(sc.getMinimumRange()).isLessThan(2000)));
}

In comparison to 3 lines in the classic way:

@Test
public void shouldAllowToUseArgumentCaptorInClassicWay() {  //old way
    //when
    ts.findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(searchCriteria);
    //then
    ArgumentCaptor<ShipSearchCriteria> captor = 
        ArgumentCaptor.forClass(ShipSearchCriteria.class);
    verify(ts).findNumberOfShipsInRangeByCriteria(captor.capture());
    assertThat(captor.getValue().getMinimumRange()).isLessThan(2000);
}

Summary

The presented add-ons were created as PoC for my conference speech, but should be fully functional and potentially useful in the specific cases. To use it in your project it is enough to use Mockito 1.10.x or 2.0.x-beta, add mockito-java8 as a dependency and of course compile your project with Java 8+.

More details are available on the project webpage: https://github.com/szpak/mockito-java8

Update 20151217. You may be also interested in my new blog post about using Mockito wihtout static imports.

Automatic release/promotion of artifacts to Maven Central from Gradle

Quick tutorial how to promote/release artifacts in a Gradle project to Maven Central, without clicking in the Nexus GUI with Gradle Nexus Staging Plugin.

Introduction

Maven Central (aka The Central Repository) is (probably) the world’s largest set of open source artifacts used by Java and JVM-based projects. It was founded by the creators of Apache Maven and it has been serving artifacts since 2002. Nowadays there are some alternatives (listed below), but for many users Maven Central is still the primary source of project dependencies (and sometimes the only one whitelisted in the corporations).

Problem

To perform the release to The Central Repository, Maven users can use Nexus Staging Maven Plugin – free, but not fully open source plugin. But with Gradle it was required to login into Nexus GUI and manually invoke two actions (close repository and release/promote repository). Quite boring and in addition highly problematic with the Continuous Delivery approach. Luckily Nexus exposes REST API which with some work allows to do the same. Gradle Nexus Staging Plugin arose to do that job.

Quick start

Important. Please pay attention that the prerequisite is to have an active and configured account in Sonatype OSSRH (OSS Repository Hosting) as well as Gradle project configured to publish release artifacts to staging repository. If you don’t have it already please follow a separate section for Gradle in the official guide.

To setup automatic release/promotion in your project add gradle-nexus-staging-plugin to the buildscript dependencies in your build.gradle file for root project:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath "io.codearte.gradle.nexus:gradle-nexus-staging-plugin:0.5.1"
    }
}

Apply the plugin:

apply plugin: 'io.codearte.nexus-staging'

Configure it:

nexusStaging {
    packageGroup = "org.mycompany.myproject"
    stagingProfileId = "yourStagingProfileId" //when not defined will be got from server using "packageGroup"
}

After successful archives upload (with maven, maven-publish or nexus plugin) to Sonatype OSSRH call:

./gradlew closeRepository promoteRepository

to close staging repository and promote/release it and its artifacts. If a synchronization with Maven Central was enabled the artifacts should automatically appear into Maven Central within several minutes.

Details

The plugin provides two main task:

• closeRepository – closes the open repository with uploaded artifacts. There should be just one open repository available in the staging profile (possible old/broken repositories can be dropped with Nexus GUI)
• promoteRepository – promotes/releases closed repository (required to put artifacts to Maven Central)

And one additional:

• getStagingProfile – gets and displays staging profile id for a given package group. This is a diagnostic task to get the value and put it into the configuration closure as stagingProfileId. To see the result it is required to call gradle with --info switch.

It has to be mentioned that calling Nexus REST API ends immediately, but the closing operation takes a moment, so to make it possible to call closeRepository promoteRepository together there is a built-in retry mechanism.

The plugin is “upload mechanism agnostic” and can be used together with maven, maven-plugin or nexus plugins.

For more details and configuration parameters see project webpage or the working example in the plugin’s own release configuration.

Alternatives to Maven Central?

There is much younger, but promising alternative – Bintray which also allows to serve artifacts. It is free for open source projects and I personally had used it for some other projects and even created an automatic release mechanism for Bintray, Travis and Gradle. It works ok, but to put artifacts also to Maven Central it is required to store a private key used for singing on their servers and in addition provide Nexus credentials. It increases the risk to have them stolen and in Codearte we prefer to use private Jenkins instance to perform the release directly to Maven Central.

Summary

With Gradle Nexus Staging Plugin the whole release process to Maven Central can be performed with Gradle from a command line and with some additional work completely automatic from a CI server. No more buttons to push in Nexus GUI. In addition to Sonatype OSSRH the plugin can be also used with private Nexus instances with enabled staging repositories.

Btw, there possibly are many things that could be enhancement in the plugin. If you need something or found a bug feel free to use issue tracker to report that.

Thanks to Kuba Kubryński for motivation and help with analyzing the not very well documented Nexus REST API.

Update 20170904. The plugin is actively developed. Check the project webpage to read about new features added since version 0.5.1.

AppFuse 3.0 with Wicket frontend released

AppFuse 3.0 has been released. It refreshes used technologies (Java 7+, Spring 4, Spring Security 3.2) and adds a bunch of new (Bootstrap 3, PrimeFaces, wro4j, WebJars and finally Apache Wicket).

From the project home page:

AppFuse is a full-stack framework for building web applications on the JVM. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time found when building new web applications for customers. Over the years, it has matured into a very testable and secure system for creating Java-based webapps. At its core, AppFuse is a project skeleton, similar to the one that’s created by your IDE when you click through a wizard to create a new web project.

I you are looking for some foundation for your project or just would like to see how the same things look in different technologies you can give AppFuse a try. A quick start page should be a good starting point.

There is also a personal thread in this story. Steadfast readers can remember that over 3 years ago I started working on Wicket frontend for AppFuse. I definitely prefer working on backends, but I wanted to get know Wicket (and its famous ability to being tested without Selenium) better and an engagement in the AppFuse development seemed to be a good way to practice these skills. There are still places in a Wicket frontend which need to be polished, but the work is mostly done (what I’m happy about :) ).

As a summary of my work I can write that even Wicket (where all page logic is written in Java or Groovy classes – no more c:forEach tags!) cannot completely remove the pain which comes with the limitation of HTTP (which wasn’t designed for the “enterprise applications”) and differences between browsers (although with jQuery and Bootstrap it is much easier). In addition 3 years is a lot of time in IT and currently there are even more use cases where component-based server side frameworks aren’t the best solution to make a good looking, responsible, scalable and trendy UI. Maybe it is time to work on an AngularJS frontend ;).

Concise, clear, with a lot of examples – the reference card for Mockito

Some time ago I’ve got an idea to make a short document briefly presenting the most important Mockito features with the real life examples. It was targeted at people wanting to quickly learn more about Mockito framework and those who use Mockito from time to time and need a small example to recall a syntax of a given construction. The result of my work was recently released by DZone as the Mockito refcard. Six – ready to print – pages filled in with condensed knowledge, a lot of examples and practical advises.

Why? This is my another action to promote practices helping to write high quality code guided by tests. Besides it always takes me a while to introduce a mocking concept and Mockito itself to a new junior developer and it is quite repetitive job. Having a Mockito refcard I can give it to that person and later talk what he/she was learned and practice it during the pair programming sessions. Pure long-term time savings :).

As a supplement I also started a series of posts about Mockito, extending a refcard with the more advanced topics which did not fit into the base version.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Paweł Lipiński who did a complete language review of a draft version and Brice Dutheil, Gordon Dickens and Tomek Kaczanowski for exchanging ideas how to make my refcard better. Krzysiek Jelski, Kamil Szymański, Marceli Kramarczuk and Kamil Żbikowski also contributed by reading a draft version and sending suggestions.

AppInfo 0.5.2 released

On the New Year’s day I released version 0.5.2 of AppInfo – a library providing an easy way to versioning your application. More about AppInfo I wrote in my previous post – step by step tutorial how to use it. In 0.5.2 ManifestReader hierarchy was internally refactored (duplication was removed, better coverage provided). I made also test and code coverage reports create automatically by CI server publicly available – I have no reason to be ashamed of my code. After all, working code is not enough :).