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JavaOne 2010 Part 4: Final Technical Sessions

Christopher Oliver 2007 “This [JavaFX] is all going to open sourced eventually.” “I am not hater. I do not anything against Flash. I actually think it was good thing. It allows UI designers to come up with effects compelling applications. You can easily do the same with Java and Java2D. It is just that it hard”

Dear All

Sothe final day, Thursday, began with the last set of technical session

9/23/10 – 11:00 AM – Hardcore Cascading Style Sheets with JavaFX – Hilton San Francisco – Yosemite A
9/23/10 – 12:30 PM – Rich GUI Testing Made Easy – Parc 55 – Divisidero
9/23/10 – 2:00 PM – Functional Programming in Java: Lessons Learned by GridGain – Parc 55 – Cyril Magnin III
9/23/10 – 3:30 PM – Writing Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), Using Groovy – Parc 55 – Cyril Magnin I

S314306 – Hardcore Cascading Style Sheets with JavaFX – Jasper Potts, Richard Bair

This was a very useful session all about the implementation of the CSS in the JavaFX. Both Potts and Bair delivered a thorough explanation of CSS engine under the hood. In fact the FX engine closely follows the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards as close as possible. The authors say the JavaFX CSS differs with the extension property names, the support for measurement units, color derivation and font sizes; and the box model.

I really like the idea of Ladder function, only available in the JavaFX and this is exactly they controls the complex of colour palettes for complex rendering. With the ladder function you achieve exact sympathy of contrast because foreground and background colours in a button or group area of a UI. Think of the colours that synthesise a bevel border or etched region for push button then you have an idea. In normal CSS you have to define separate selector classes and then arrange in the XHTML as nested hierarchy of DIV elements. With JavaFX CSS you can just one selector class and you can arrange colour region in a sequence. Jasper Potts should blog some an examples in order to explain this better. Overall this session was worth its weight in gold.

S313605 – Rich GUI Testing Made Easy – Alex Ruiz, Oracle; Yvonne Price, Guidewire

For a change lets us just talk about the conclusion first. Alex Ruiz presented the best concise for GUI Testing that I have seen for no long time. His co-conspirator Yvonne Price had lost her voice the night before, because she had a been a bit vocal at the Don Henley concert the night before at the Oracle appreciation event. This fact did not detract from the overall quality of this technical session. So you may already know Alex Ruiz is the lead and creator of an open source project called FEST (Fixtures for Easy Software Testing).

Ruiz talked about the concept of GUI testing, why we should do it. He also explained why many engineer felt is hard to test GUI. Recording tools like XLoader and not easy to maintain and you cannot refactor the recording if the UI changes. So Ruiz proposed the idea of fluent testing, where you concentrate on testing the UI of the application, without delving deep in the UI toolkit. In other words, one does not want to test the operation of the Swing button, but because you want to navigate to the button of business action, which may go like this.

Name: Login Button
Action: Click on Button
Check: Assert Find Dialog called “Login Dialog” is Opened

Name: Login Dialog / Username
Action: Enter text at Text Field “Author_Daley”

Name: Login Dialog / Password
Action: Enter text at Password Field “p8ssw0rd”

Name: Login Dialog / Submit
Action: Click on Button “OK”
Check: Assert Find Dialog called “Login Dialog” is Closed

Please note that FEST is not exactly like this, but this is example of a weak domain specific language.

The point of the Alex’s presentation was that GUI testing can be just be simple. It is scriptable, refactorable and can be package into sub function and shared with a group of test methods. In other words you can write your own testing library for your project. Alex Ruiz was very good quality on the day and definitely one to watch for the future. It is same his conspirator could not help vocally, but I am quite sure she takes credit for the overall preparation.

S313977 – Functional Programming in Java – Nikita Ivanov, GridGain, Inc

Unfortunately I decided at the last minute not to go this one. So I cannot comment on it.

S314154 – Writing Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), Using Groovy – Paul King, ASERT

There have been final technical sessions of conference, which are boring, uninspirational, lack lustré and boring. Let me assure you this technical session by Paul King, Groovy enthusiast, was exceptionable for a technical excellence and communicating information. If you are thinking about building Domain Specific Languages in Groovy and indeed in any other JVM language then this was one definitely worth a look. Paul King had a lot of slides and lots of knowledge and one can see that he does this presenting “thing” for living.

The session began by explaining some of the features of the Groovy in comparison to stock Java. As JVM language, dynamic in all of its beauty, Groovy has a high degree of ease-of-development. It has closures and a meta object programming model. Indeed, Paul King spent a lot of time describing Groovy Recipes or fast pace chuck of Groovy in Action before he got the MOP and DSL. Admittedly, if Groovy beginners or even intermediate may have required this quick refresher on concepts.

In general Paul King explained the three ways to create a DSL in Groovy: one can write a builder in the same way as XML or Html builder, one can take advantage of the Expando objects and then create Categories to simulate natural language behaviour and, probably for the advance developer, look at AST transformation. 

This is Peter Pilgrim, who is in San Francisco for the JavaOne 2010 conference. Out

23/September/2010