DDevelopment & Design

Few thoughts on Crockford’s “JavaScript: The Good Parts”

I’ve just finished reading Crockford’s book and decided to drop a few lines before I put it back on company bookshelf. In my opinion this is MUST READ for anyone who ever touches any JS code. Especially that JS T.G.P. is actually a very quick read, just a few days of reading if you want to be honest to yourself and grasp all the concepts. Very, very precise book which tells you exactly the things you want to know. In essence – no fluff, just stuff. Another good thing about this book is that it doesn’t say anything about dreaded browsers or DOM manipulation. You devote just a tiny bit of your time and you get rewarded with comforting feeling that you now know all the essentials. I also started googling to check out what people say about Crockford’s idea of encapsulation and information hiding using functions lexical scoping. He even proposes to drop JavaScript pseudo-classical inheritance pattern in favor of functional inheritance pattern to promote information hiding. This is something I personally feel skeptic about. Information hiding is one of the pillars of OO but you need to ask yourself how much you’re willing to pay to get it. In my opinion, when you need to use functions which create functions you sacrifice code verbosity and clarity and that’s a bit too much. My skepticism got even stronger when few days ago I started reading source code for SmartClient – JS library made by Isomorphic. Guys who made this software are pros, no doubt about it. They created their own inheritance mechanism which only supports Crockford’s statement that native JavaScript pseudo-classical inheritance model should not be used. But they use naming conventions instead of real information hiding. If they want property to be private they prefix their names with “_” character and then they pretend it’s private. The same with private methods. Technically you can access it from anywhere , but why? What’s your excuse? You can’t say you didn’t know underscore means private. When I look at SmartClient code written using this convention it looks more natural, more intuitive and easier to read than even small examples which use functional scoping for information hiding. For me that is more important than feeling that my code can’t be tampered with by my team mates or other scripts. Just to sum up, let me make it clear that those facts do not change my overall feeling about the book I’ve just read. If you do JavaScript, even occasionally, you must read it. I think this book is one of top 3 most recommended books on the web. Thank you Douglas Crockford, keep up the good work. Łukasz Kucharski PS. Read English version of the book. Polish translation is simply too much to handle.

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DDevelopment & Design

How to automate tests with Groovy 2.0, Spock and Gradle

This is the launch of the 1st blog in my life, so cheers and have a nice reading!

y u no test?

Couple of years ago I wasn't a big fan of unit testing. It was obvious to me that well prepared unit tests are crucial though. I didn't known why exactly crucial yet then. I just felt they are important. My disliking to write automation tests was mostly related to the effort necessary to prepare them. Also a spaghetti code was easily spotted in test sources.

Some goodies at hand

Now I know! Test are crucial to get a better design and a confidence. Confidence to improve without a hesitation. Moreover, now I have the tool to make test automation easy as Sunday morning... I'm talking about the Spock Framework. If you got here probably already know what the Spock is, so I won't introduce it. Enough to say that Spock is an awesome unit testing tool which, thanks to Groovy AST Transformation, simplifies creation of tests greatly.

An obstacle

The point is, since a new major version of Groovy has been released (2.0), there is no matching version of Spock available yet.

What now?

Well, in a matter of fact there is such a version. It's still under development though. It can be obtained from this Maven repository. We can of course use the Maven to build a project and run tests. But why not to go even more "groovy" way? XML is not for humans, is it? Lets use Gradle.

The build file

Update: at the end of the post is updated version of the build file.
apply plugin: 'groovy'

apply plugin: 'idea'


def langLevel = 1.7


sourceCompatibility = langLevel

targetCompatibility = langLevel


group = 'com.tamashumi.example.testwithspock'

version = '0.1'


repositories {

    mavenLocal()

    mavenCentral()

    maven { url 'http://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/' }

}


dependencies {

    groovy 'org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all:2.0.1'

    testCompile 'org.spockframework:spock-core:0.7-groovy-2.0-SNAPSHOT'

}


idea {

    project {

        jdkName = langLevel

        languageLevel = langLevel

    }

}
As you can see the build.gradle file is almost self-explanatory. Groovy plugin is applied to compile groovy code. It needs groovy-all.jar - declared in version 2.0 at dependencies block just next to Spock in version 0.7. What's most important, mentioned Maven repository URL is added at repositories block.

Project structure and execution

Gradle's default project directory structure is similar to Maven's one. Unfortunately there is no 'create project' task and you have to create it by hand. It's not a big obstacle though. The structure you will create will more or less look as follows: 
<project root>

│

├── build.gradle

└── src

    ├── main

    │   ├── groovy

    └── test

        └── groovy
To build a project now you can type command gradle build or gradle test to only run tests.

How about Java?

You can test native Java code with Spock. Just add src/main/java directory and a following line to the build.gradle: 
apply plugin: 'java'
This way if you don't want or just can't deploy Groovy compiled stuff into your production JVM for any reason, still whole goodness of testing with Spock and Groovy is at your hand.

A silly-simple example

Just to show that it works, here you go with a basic example.

Java simple example class:

public class SimpleJavaClass {


    public int sumAll(int... args) {


        int sum = 0;


        for (int arg : args){

            sum += arg;

        }


        return sum;

    }

}

Groovy simple example class:

class SimpleGroovyClass {


    String concatenateAll(char separator, String... args) {


        args.join(separator as String)

    }

}

The test, uhm... I mean the Specification:

class JustASpecification extends Specification {


    @Unroll('Sums integers #integers into: #expectedResult')

    def "Can sum different amount of integers"() {


        given:

            def instance = new SimpleJavaClass()


        when:

            def result = instance.sumAll(* integers)


        then:

            result == expectedResult


        where:

            expectedResult | integers

            11             | [3, 3, 5]

            8              | [3, 5]

            254            | [2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128]

            22             | [7, 5, 6, 2, 2]

    }


    @Unroll('Concatenates strings #strings with separator "#separator" into: #expectedResult')

    def "Can concatenate different amount of integers with a specified separator"() {


        given:

            def instance = new SimpleGroovyClass()


        when:

            def result = instance.concatenateAll(separator, * strings)


        then:

            result == expectedResult


        where:

            expectedResult     | separator   | strings

            'Whasup dude?'     | ' ' as char | ['Whasup', 'dude?']

            '2012/09/15'       | '/' as char | ['2012', '09', '15']

            'nice-to-meet-you' | '-' as char | ['nice', 'to', 'meet', 'you']

    }

}
To run tests with Gradle simply execute command gradle test. Test reports can be found at <project root>/build/reports/tests/index.html and look kind a like this.


Please note that, thanks to @Unroll annotation, test is executed once per each parameters row in the 'table' at specification's where: block. This isn't a Java label, but a AST transformation magic.

IDE integration

Gradle's plugin for Iintellij Idea

I've added also Intellij Idea plugin for IDE project generation and some configuration for it (IDE's JDK name). To generate Idea's project files just run command: gradle idea There are available Eclipse and Netbeans plugins too, however I haven't tested them. Idea's one works well.

Intellij Idea's plugins for Gradle

Idea itself has a light Gradle support built-in on its own. To not get confused: Gradle has plugin for Idea and Idea has plugin for Gradle. To get even more 'pluginated', there is also JetGradle plugin within Idea. However I haven't found good reason for it's existence - well, maybe excluding one. It shows dependency tree. There is a bug though - JetGradle work's fine only for lang level 1.6. Strangely all the plugins together do not conflict each other. They even give complementary, quite useful tool set.

Running tests under IDE

Jest to add something sweet this is how Specification looks when run with jUnit  runner under Intellij Idea (right mouse button on JustASpecification class or whole folder of specification extending classes and select "Run ...". You'll see a nice view like this.

Building web application

If you need to build Java web application and bundle it as war archive just add plugin by typing the line 
apply plugin: 'war'
in the build.gradle file and create a directory src/main/webapp.

Want to know more?

If you haven't heard about Spock or Gradle before or just curious, check the following links:

What next?

The last thing left is to write the real production code you are about to test. No matter will it be Groovy or Java, I leave this to your need and invention. Of course, you are welcome to post a comments here. I'll answer or even write some more posts about the subject.

Important update

Spock version 0.7 has been released, so the above build file doesn't work anymore. It's easy to fix it though. Just remove last dash and a word SNAPSHOT from Spock dependency declaration. Other important thing is that now spock-core depends on groovy-all-2.0.5, so to avoid dependency conflict groovy dependency should be changed from version 2.0.1 to 2.0.5.
Besides oss.sonata.org snapshots maven repository can be removed. No obstacles any more and the build file now looks as follows: 
apply plugin: 'groovy'

apply plugin: 'idea'


def langLevel = 1.7


sourceCompatibility = langLevel

targetCompatibility = langLevel


group = 'com.tamashumi.example.testwithspock'

version = '0.1'


repositories {

    mavenLocal()

    mavenCentral()

}


dependencies {

    groovy 'org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all:2.0.5'

    testCompile 'org.spockframework:spock-core:0.7-groovy-2.0'

}


idea {

    project {

        jdkName = langLevel

        languageLevel = langLevel

    }

}