Pushing the envelope

The Lucene guys have added an updated file format information page. Interesting for wannabe searchengine technology mavens (like me).

There's also a new article on the site about the LARM webcrawler project that's currently underway here.

Spent the afternoon making a servlet based application run all by itself by mocking the HttpServletRequest/Response, ServletContext etc etc. interfaces. It was also a great opportunity to use dynamic proxies in anger for the first time. I ended up with a rather nice abstract implementation of InvocationHandler that contained a Map of method names and MethodReceiver objects for the calls I cared about. Using dynamic proxies saved loads of time - I could code up canned responses to the method calls I was interested in and ignore the rest. It was kind of fun being able to instantiate a servlet inside a TestCase, call doGet() and get all the HTML dumped to System.out.

I didn't quite reimplement EasyMock from scratch, but there's probably some synergy to be had there...

I've posted a straight copy of my ANT build file for Webwork up here.

The project is just something I was toying with as an excuse for learning Webwork & Castor - its vapour at the moment - don't expect a Roller-killer anytime soon :)

I'll add some more details (source code, jsp's, required jar files etc.) as and when it occurs to me.

Untangling the Gordian Knot. Currently working on a project to untangle a hairball project. Its quite tempting to cut the Gordian Knot, but we... [development]

Interfaces are my friend in this situation. I have found it really useful to extract a single method on the bloated object I'm trying to break up into an interface, and substituting a reference to the interface in the calling code wherever possible, repeating for each method, initially by defining one interface per method, and occasionally consolidating the interfaces where I find that several of them are passed around together. It does mean that for really blob-like objects, at about the halfway stage I find myself with humourous constructors like:-

MyThing thing = new MyThing(this, this, this, this, this);

Where 'this' is some bloated object that now implements 5 distinct interfaces, and the target class has been refactored to work through the interfaces. Its so obviously wrong that sheer embarrassment forces you to keep refactoring until its all clean. Writing tests gets really easy too. Its easy to make the TestCase implement an interface and pass itself to the object under test (self-shunt pattern) when the interface only declares one method!