Test-Driven Web Development on Spring and Hibernate

Adam Shimali and I will be piloting our TDD course at SPA2009 on the Sunday afternoon. Three two-hour samples of a full two-day course for free - and you get a 10% discount off the cost of the full course for yourself or a colleague.

The course is very hands-on. If you bring a laptop (Windows or MacOS) we can provide you with the complete Eclipse development environment installation on a CD or memory stick - you'll be good to go in about five minutes. It will help if you've done a bit of Java programming before, but even this is not essential as you'll be paired with someone experienced.

There's still time to book for SPA2009, but don't delay!

XPath made simple

I know I'm a bit behind the curve on this one, but I've only just stumbled across a really useful tool:

XPather can

• generate XPaths while browsing or inspecting HTML/XML/*ML documents
• evaluate your XPaths and inspect the results
• extract the content of *ML documents
  

The latest version 1.4.1 was released on June 18 2008 (Firefox 3.0 compatible).

XPather is a simple Firefox extension that integrates both with the browser and its DOMInspector. It is designed to be lightweight and cross-platform. It is valuable mainly as a web/XML-app development and debugging tool. In combination with the DOMInspector, which I can also highly recommend, it is particularly useful for developing WebTest scripts: right-click in any element of a page that you want your script to compare or set, and the option "Show in XPather" pops up a new window with the precise XPath to select that element.

Testing web applications? Cucumber is the cool new kid on the block

I've had quite complimentary things to say about Canoo WebTest, but one thing it doesn't provide out of the box is a representation of the tests that your average customer is able to read and understand intuitively - that is to say, a tabular format like Fit or a narrative of the "Given... when... then... " form.

Cucumber to the rescue! I heard several people mention this at the recent XP Day in London. I hope to investigate it in more depth soon.

I would be interested to know whether it can be used to test anything other than Ruby code and whether it can drive a web browser to interact with Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Stuart Ervine's and Nat Pryce's GWT development demo at XP Day was truly impressive. Nat has combined WebDriver with WindowLicker to create a clean interface between a test script and synchronous or asynchronous RIAs. But telling a jUnit test to move the mouse cursor into a particular widget and click the button was nothing if not verbose!

New Test-Driven Development training course

I have just completed work on a training course in test-driven development, intended for delivery over two days or self-study, which uses the development of a dating service as a worked example. Along the way, students will learn to use data access objects (DAO), Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) using Hibernate, Spring, jMock and Canoo WebTest. These tools will, I hope, provide them with good insights into the way that test-driven approaches alter the way in which software architectures grow, leading to more robust yet flexible designs.

My thanks to Adam Shimali, who developed the material initially. He and I aim to present a five-hour "taster" of this course on the Sunday afternoon at SPA2009.