Keep the bar green to keep the code clean

Always on the quest for efficiency I reconsidered the usability of SWT FormLayout lately. Although it is one of my favored core layouts with respect to flexibility, I had to recognize that it is only reluctantly used by most of my fellow workers. Proposing it for an appropriate task sometimes...

Mockito is my favored little helper if it comes down to write light weight JUnit tests. It is very useful to replace the ‘real’ dependencies of a unit under test easily by mocks if necessary. In particular when working on the borderline to framework APIs such dependencies can otherwise be...

Finding good names is one of the challenges of crafting software. And you need to find them all the time and for everything – classes, methods, variables, just to name a few. But what makes a name a good name? To quote Uncle Bob: ‘Three things: Readability, readability, and readability!’...

Writing tests for SWT based UIs often requires to notify widget listeners programmatically. Unfortunately, the code to create, initialize and finally to trigger the event is a bit verbose and distracts from the actual purpose of the test. After writing similar initialization routines a couple of times I came up...

Actually I did not, neither did Google and the API documentation seems to miss out one crucial point – which took me some time to figure out. So I decided to be a nice boy scout and share my findings as my good deed of the day 1. According to...

My colleague Moritz of EclipseSource recently came across Google Auto, a collection of Java code generators. AutoValue is one of them and generates Java code for immutable objects. It provides an annotation and an annotation processor to generate Java code for immutable value objects. The current version is labelled RC1...

Rüdiger and I have written a lot of SWT test cases for our current RCP project lately. Most of the time we can execute them as plain JUnit tests. Still they also have to run in a RCP integration environment. Long story short we wrote a DisplayHelper fixture to reduce...

Recently I had the problem that my ‘well-conceived’ view design did not scale down reasonably. I realized that the flexibility to arrange viewparts in stacks of arbitrary sizes in an Eclipse workbench window does not exactly ease the development of appealing UIs. At least if you strive for more than...

Sometimes I miss the forest for the trees – and that for a disturbingly long time. I just became aware of this once again recently, typing one of the more verbose mockito expressions for the umpteenth time. The statement in question was a doAnswer(Answer) construct which always feels a bit...