TSE, post 2
Today has been a busy day thus far at TSE 2005. The talk by Keith and Christian was not so much about Agile as it was about the Spring build environment. Instead of having one monolithic build, they are moving towards a more modular approach where each component of the project (such as core, aop, dao, etc) has its own build file. They are also setting up common build targets that are shared across the various build files for each module. Jar file dependency is handled by a project called Ivy. Previously I had known of only Maven that handled this sort of thing. However Ivy is focused strictly towards jar dependencies, whereas Maven has a larger scope.
Christian is one of the main developers for the Spring IDE project which is an Eclipse plugin for managing Spring projects. It performs validation for Spring XML files, including format (making sure the file conforms to the DTD) and content (by making sure the various classes and properties exist. It also generates a graphical representation of the application context configuration. One nice feature of this project is the graphical editor for Spring Web Flow. Since SWF is a moving target, the IDE does not have support for the latest and greatest, but it should be catching up as soon as SWF goes 1.0.
Next I attended a talk by the always entertaining Matt Raible on TDD with Spring and Hibernate. This talk was mostly in the context of App Fuse, which I had heard him talk about previously at the Orlando JUG. He mentioned a class that is provided by Spring that makes it easier to test DAOs. It wraps a transaction around a test method and performs a rollback when the method has executed, which allows testing with a real database (as opposed to using mocks) but prevents polluting the database with test data. Right now I have a test DAO layer where the transaction boundaries are defined at the DAO method layer. Even though I do have a test database that I can pretty much trash, it would be nice to not have to. I think I’ll give this test class a closer look.
