Fred's Random Thoughts Frederic Jean's Weblog

Montreal and Vancouver Considered Fast Cities

Fast Company, an icon of the dot com bubble, has been posting a series of articles on what it calls “Fast Cities.” Fast cities combine culture, education, technology and tolerance to attract the creative class. After listing fast cities in the US, they turned their attention to 5 global fast cities.

I find it very interesting that out of the 5 cities, 2 of them are in Canada. Montreal is cited for its mixture of old Europe charms and modern amenities, while Vancouver is praised for it's video game industry.

As a Montreal native, I really do like to see the city recognized as such. It is a beautiful city, and it has a unique feel to it. I do enjoy visiting it when I can.

-- Fred

I Think I Caught That JUnit Bug...

It would appear that I am test infected. It's odd since I used to resist writing JUnit tests as much as I could. There were so many things that were just hard to test.

I did play with Cactus to try to test my servlets and filters, but never quite could get it to work. HttpUnit is fine, but it is more geared toward functional testing rather than unit testing. I ended up pretty much giving up on testing them properly.

Two things happened though.

First, I played with Ruby on Rails. I was curious, so I downloaded the framework, watched the demos and worked through the tutorials. I even got both the PickAxe and the Ruby on Rails book from the Pragmatic Programmers. I realized then that unit testing didn't have to be so painful and frustrating.

I then started to use Spring. Spring is amazing as an Inversion of Control container. So far, it has made my job a lot easier with its focus on Dependency Injection. When it comes to testing, Spring ships with a library of mock objects mimicking J2EE objects. It makes testing the application a lot easier and a lot more fun. Tests aren't difficult to setup anymore, they run fast. And with a little work, it integrates nicely into NetBeans.

I still have a lot more work to do. I guess that I should get back to it...

-- Fred

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