Java Power Tools Book Review

Just yesterday, I finally finished reading and working out some of the samples from the Java Power Tools book. The detailed chapter wise review is now live at Javalobby.

I am really amazed at how many tools John has covered, and also with such great detail.

It took me a while to add just the links to all the 30 tools John has covered in my review. Each time I added a link, I kept wondering how much time John must have spent writing about each one of these. Awesome. I have such great admiration for John for providing us with such a wonderful book.

Even though the book is heavy, and has 910 pages, I carry it everyday to work. It is a great reference book for all the tools as well.

Also, with the help of this book, and only this book I was able to write my first simple and most simple project using Maven. Yes, you heard me right Maven. Had tried using Maven many times, and every sample I downloaded just failed complaining about some dependency which I wasn't even sure where it was being stored.

SoapUI, CI and Coverage

In the first two parts(part 1 and part 2) of this series we have seen how to use SoapUI to write functional tests for web services and also how to use Groovy for test setup, properties transfer, and assertions. As we have already said, tests should be integrated with your builds and should be able to be run with them. If you have automated your builds and they are running as part of your continuous integration (CI) setup, SoapUI comes in even handier: you can run the test suites and the test cases you created and, moreover, you can generate JUnit reports.

This part of the series guides you step-by-step through the Ant tasks for running tests written using SoapUI, generating JUnit reports, integrating with CI, and to top it all off getting code coverage using Cobertura. When you are done with this part, you will be able to reap the benefits of writing tests, continuous integration, and code coverage.

Read the complete article here at Javalobby.

Functional Web Services Testing Made Easy with SoapUI - Part 3

SoapUI's so Groovy

Functional Web Services Testing Made Easy with SoapUI - Part 2 is live at the at Javalobby. Part 1 of this series helped provide the background needed to begin exploring web services testing. We learned the basics of SoapUI and how easy it was to write functional tests without writing a single line of code. We also saw how to add assertions to these tests. What we will examine now is how to use Groovy within SoapUI for test setup, test teardown, response validation, and much, much more.

Take a look at your leisure, as always give me a yell in case you need to find out more.

Java Power Tools Finally Arrived

I came home today after work, exhausted sitting in the traffic for almost 2 hours. Opened the door, and to my surprise, I saw the Java Power Tools book waiting for me to be opened. The book is indeed heavy with almost 900 pages. This was one of the books I was waiting to read and review so badly.

I had interviewed John Ferguson Smart a long time back for Javalobby. From the day I did this interview, I was so enthusiastically waiting to read the book. I did glance over a few of the chapters, it is just unbelievable. With 30 tools being covered in this book, I will have to review this book in two parts.

I should mention that I did read the foreword first, since it is written by Andrew Glover, President of Stelligent. And that's where I work. :)

If you are writing software using Java, you should without a doubt get this book.

Stay tuned for the detailed review at Javalobby.

Functional Web Services Testing Made Easy with SoapUI - Part 1

I have written a detailed article at Javalobby which provides step by step instructions on how to write functional tests for your web services using SoapUI.

Here are the links where you can find the article on various Zones at Javalobby:
1. Java Zone
2. Architects Zone
3. SOA Zone

The next part in this article will cover SoapUI and Groovy.
Give me a yell if you need any help.