About the Author:

Frank Appel

Frank realigned to software development in 1995 - working as freelancer while part-time studying IT at FernUniversität Hagen. Soon he focused on Java and specialized in frameworks and tooling. From 2001 he led the development of W4Toolkit and W4 Eclipse on behalf of Innoopract Informationssysteme GmbH, now EclipseSource. Since 2006 he was technical lead of the RAP Project. He joined Heiler Software AG as head of development PIM in 2009 and since August 2011 he earns his living again as freelancer.

Frank is a stalwart of agile methods and test driven development in particular. He understands software development as a craftsmanship based on a mix of knowledge and the experience of the daily work. (EMail: fappel@codeaffine.com, Twitter: @frank_appel)

Posts by Frank Appel:

Running JUnit Tests Repeatedly Without Loops

Recently I came across a problem where I had to write tests for a method that calculates randomly distributed values within a certain range of possibilities 1. More precisely if you assume a signature that looks like interface RandomRangeValueCalculator { long calculateRangeValue( long center, long radius ); } a test might verify the following2: public [...]

Posted in Common | 4 Comments »

WordPress Webhooked into GitHub

Code Affine is published using WordPress. Besides content provisioning there are technical tasks like site composition and software maintenance we have to take care of. Hence we were looking for a pragmatic but efficient way that allows us to develop locally, do versioning of changes, publish such changes automatically and last but not least run [...]

Posted in Common | No Comments »

Working Efficiently with JUnit in Eclipse

Recently I was dragged into a discussion1 with some test infected2 fellows about how we use JUnit within the Eclipse IDE. Surprisingly the conversation brought up some ‘tips and tricks’ not everybody was aware of. This gave me the idea to write this post doing a sum up of our talk. Who knows – maybe [...]

Posted in Eclipse | 9 Comments »

JUnit Rules

The first time I stumbled over a JUnit @Rule annotation I was a bit irritated of the concept. Having a public field in a test case seemed somewhat odd and so I was reluctant to use it regularly. But after a while I got used to that and it turned out that rules can ease [...]

Posted in Common | 3 Comments »

Running HTTP/REST Integration Tests efficiently in Eclipse

Lately I had a chance to use the OSGi-JAX-RS-Connector library written by my dear fellow Holger Staudacher. The connector enables you to publish resources easily by registering @Path annotated types as OSGi services – which actually works quite nicely. While it is natural for me to write the service classes test driven using plain JUnit [...]

Posted in Common, Eclipse | 8 Comments »

Performance Analysis of REST/HTTP Services with JMeter and Yourkit

My last post described how to accomplish stress- or load-testing of asynchronous REST/HTTP services with JMeter. However, running such tests often reveals that the system under test does not deal well with increasing load. The question is now how to find the bottleneck? Having an in-depth look at the code to detect suspicious parts could [...]

Posted in Common | 6 Comments »

Stress/Load-Testing of Asynchronous HTTP/REST Services with JMeter

Although I have been using JMeter for stress- and load-testing of web applications a good few times it took us a while to figure out how to test asynchronous HTTP/REST based services with the tool. With us I mean a fellow programmer – Holger Staudacher, I have the honor to work with currently on a [...]

Posted in Common | 16 Comments »

EclipseCon Europe — RAP Talk On-Line

The last weeks were very exciting since I could talk about the new RAP OSGi integration feature (see I, II, III) on various occasions. It was amazing to see how the RAP community has evolved over the last years. While in the early days you always had to do the slot “What is RAP” and [...]

Posted in Eclipse | 2 Comments »

Democamp Slides

For those who are interested I’ve uploaded the slides of my presentations at the eclipse democamps in bonn and munich. Thanks to Matthias, Jonas and Maximilian for organizing the events and giving me an opportunity to talk about the possibilties given with the new RWT OSGi integration bundle available in RAP.

Posted in Eclipse | 1 Comment »

Added Event Page to CodeAffine Website

Just a short note that I have introduced a new page in our codeaffine wordpress system to have the possibility to advert upcomming events where we participate and contribute.

Posted in Common | No Comments »