Customer Reviews

Professional Java Tools for Extreme Programming: Ant, XDoclet, JUnit, Cactus, and Maven (Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I find if you are doing J2EE development this book is a must-have! Even if you are not doing XP. Don't let the XP title turn you off from this book.

At first glance at this book, I thought it was trying to be too many things to too many people. It seems to contain every buzzword: Opensource, Extreme Programming, Java, JSP, TagLibs, EJB, etc.

However the book focuses on applying Ant, JUnit and Cactus to J2EE development.

The book is very J2EE and web application centric. A small part of the book had very choppy flow--a few rough spots. Mostly (95%) the book is well written. Generally the book is easy to follow.
My favorite chapters are the ones on JUnitPerf and Cactus.

The case studies are a little long, but they can be skipped and returned to later.

The source code on the website is hidden in plain site. It took a while to find it.

The description above and title miss an important point. The book is J2EE/Jakarta centric. J2EE testing and continous integration can be very difficult without the use of Ant, JUnit, HttpUnit and Cactus.

The description of the book on the companion website clears up the missing points well. I found the description while searching for the source code.

From the companion website:

"Java Tools for eXtreme Programming describes techniques for implementing the Extreme Programming practices of Automated Testing and Continuous Integration using Open Source tools, e.g., Ant, JUnit, HttpUnit, JMeter, and much more."

"The book contains small examples and tutorials on each tool. The examples cover building, deploying, and testing Java and J2EE applications."

"In addition to small examples, there are larger case studies. The case studies are larger more realistic examples. We have case studies involving XSLT, EJB, Struts, JDBC, etc."

"Each case study is complete with an ant build script and several tests, written with JUnit, HttpUnit, Cactus, JUnitPerf and/or JMeter. The case studies focus on building, deploying and testing J2EE applications with Ant and JUnit."

"There is also a reference section for APIs. Instead of rehashing the API documentation, the reference section has example usage, i.e., code examples for the important classes and methods."

"Although this book speaks from an XP perspective, you need not practice XP to benefit from it. For example, you do not have to adopt the entire XP methodology to get value out of this book. Automated testing, for example, can help you refactor code regardless of whether you are doing pair programming or not. Continuous integration can help you detect and fix problems early in the lifecycle of the system regardless of whether your customer is on site or not."

This book is not about extreme programming (XP). Rather it teaches open source software tools we can use to utilize one important aspect of XP: Continuous testing. XP principles say that you should write your unit test code according to the requirements *before* you write any application code. That guarantees that your software meets the minimum requirements for now. And if refactoring is needed in the future (likely), you will have a set of unit tests that can guarantee the changes you make are correct. In this book, the authors discuss frameworks and tools to write and automate the testing process for sophisticated application server software.

The authors started with Jakarta build tool ANT. As a build automation tool, ANT is used throughout the rest of the article to provide an integration point for other test tools. ANT itself is not very complicated (It is designed to be easy-to-use!). The book goes through simple ANT syntax and build processes. The authors also give an advanced example of automating the build and deployment process of a complex J2EE web application. It is a nice review of different components of a J2EE application and how they work together.

After ANT, the authors move on to discuss the popular Java unit test framework JUnit. JUnit is not really so much a "tool" since it only offers very simple implementing classes. But rather, it is a "framework" that provides the conceptual basis of object oriented unit testing. It defines the steps to setup and execute tests. JUnit can be extended to make specialized and automated tests for complex circumstances.

One such specialized, JUnit based testing tool is Jakarta Cactus for J2EE application unit testing. This book really shines in its explanation and extensive examples on how to install, setup and use Cactus. The difficulty of J2EE unit tests is that all components have to run inside J2EE containers. Cactus counter this by running tests on both client side and server side. Once ANT automatically redelopyed and restarted the server, the client side Cactus test engine sends out requests to the server using customized request/response connectors. The connectors pass the information to server side Cactus and allow it to setup server side environments such as session objects and context objects, according to the test requirements. Then the server runs the test case and sends the results back to the client. The client tests assertions and and reports to the tester. That process guarantees the server side test code runs under a controlled environment.

Cactus unit testing can be quite complex due to the multiple parties involved. So, the authors give a good example on how to test JSP custom tags. It illustrates how to setup those tests and test the life cycle methods for each tag handler step by step. This is an example on how to use Cactus in real life.

Unit testing is an important development method. But in complex in-container J2EE applications, we also need to make sure all units work together in integration (function) tests. The authors discussed integration test tool HttpUnit, performance test tool JUnitPref and JMeter.

Overall, this is an excellent book covering a wide range of Java build and testing issues. It would be even better if you can provide more examples outside of J2EE area. Examples on automated testings in GUI applications and even J2ME applications can be very useful.

I have been struggling with turning XP methodology into a solid development process. We've had some success at my company but most times we've met frustrations primarily because we were trying to teach old tools new tricks.

Rick Hightower's java Tools for XP has made a big difference for us. My team has been able to use the tools described in this book to actually DO unit testing, and we've already automated a significant portion of our testing and deployment processes. Its also let us make a good case for open source tools at my company.

I agree with one reviewer that the chapter on the sample application is tough to get through. This chapter is LONG!!! But it was worth it because obviously you have to understand you application to build appropriate tests. The tests in the book did a great job of showing us what we should be doing with our own applications.

Maybe it's a learning style difference but I disagree with the reviewer who complained about the API chapters. I found them useful because 1) they weren't a lame rehash of the docs, and 2) they have a ton of code snippets. So I read the chapters to get the overall gist of the tool and see examples of it working, and then mainly used the API chapters at the back to build my tests.

One small complaint about the book: I was suprised when I got it that the cover was washed out. It looked like Amazon had it sitting in their window for a while before they sent it to me. But hey, the inside sure is easy to read!

Overall I definitely recommend this book as the first book to make XP real.

This book does a great job of explaining how to use each of the tools but what I really appreciate is that it shows you how to use the tools together. For example, the Cactus chapter tells you how to use Cactus to do Mock Object (a new approach that extends the concepts of XP unit testing). Great! What makes the whole chapter really useful is that the code project in this chapter shows you how to use JUnit, Ant, and Cactus together to do XP testing on a set of JSPs in a Web application. These are the great things in this book that are not covered in the tool docs and this is the kind of information i can use in my work every day.

This book really works to extend XP concepts found in other books. A good example is the chapter on HttpUnit, which deals with functional testing (important stuff that usually gets downplayed by most us XPers). Here again this chapter tells you how to use HttpUnit and JUnit together to spider all the user-accessible pages on your site and make sure there are no broken links.

This book helped me see how to use a group of tools together to build great XP tests for my Web apps. Thank you!

Very disappointed in this text. The examples do not scale to real world projects. Take a look at the petstore ant build structure before you adopt the approach suggested by Rich. Also - the examples are ridden with errors and hardcoded nonsense. The tools presented can be used in a manner more elegant than the author presents. Take the lessons with a grain of salt and refactor a process that works for you. (The text off the shelf won't work for most projects.) Plenty of good information available here if you are experienced and willing to sift through some mediocre examples.

Extreme Programming (XP), a methodology developed by Kent Beck and Eric Gamma, has joined CASE/UML as a core practice in professional software development. The central tools for XP (JUnit, Ant, Cactus, JMeter, HttpUnit) are now covered in a practical reference by Richard Hightower that explains how these open source tools should be integrated into a project to achieve XP's benefits.

The book follows the construction of an online pet store--similar to Sun's J2EE Blueprint Pet Store but instead of focusing on J2EE technologies, Hightower's example illustrates how XP tools are integrated into a project.

The tuturials work through several iterations of the pet store. The baseline version has no connection pooling and no EJBs. It has several JSPs, a few classes that use JDBC, and some tables in a database.

The second iteration of the case changes the content management piece of the system to a container managed persistence (CMP) entity bean that implements the backend product management. This iteration demonstrates how to incorporate EJB deployment into Web applications and how to ensure that the unit testing of the category systems still works after the addition of CMP entity bean support.

The third iteration of the case study uses an EJB stateless session bean to add pooling of connections and prepared statements. This iteration is used to demonstrate JUnitPerf and show the time savings from pooling prepared statements when the site is hit by many users.

The fourth iteration of the case study creates a Catalog TagLib. Cactus is used to test this TagLib. This is an excellent example to learn how to operate and run Cactus tests and how to integrate them into the build/deploy process.

The fifth iteration of the case study refactors JSPs using the Apache Struts project. Then, it uses HttpUnit to test that the application still works. The HttpUnit test is run against the baseline and new version to show that the requirements are still met.

The sixth and final iteration of the case study refactors the Web application to use Exstensible Style Language Transformation (XSLT) instead of JSP to build the catalog view. It then compares the throughput of the two approaches using JMeter.

I've found it very difficult to follow the partially finished documentation for many of the useful open source tools needed for full XP. Having a book like Hightower's is invaluable to fully leverage the benefits of the XP movement in mid to large scale development efforts.

This a must-have reference for anyone seriously interested in XP and its application in the software industry. I found a lot of really good examples of how to do continous integration and automate testing. Most of the technologies covered are pretty new and have the big bonus of being open source! All in all, XP and Java are a very robust combination and this book is doing a good job of showing it.

This book describes the techniques for implementing the eXtreme Programming (XP) practices of automated testing and integration under the auspices of XP. This book is not meant as XP tutorial even though the book includes a good introduction to eXtreme Programming and the practices that make up XP.

For the uninitiated, eXtreme Programming (XP) is a pragmatic approach to software development that emphasizes results first and takes an incremental, `build something that works quick' approach to building the product, using continual testing and refactoring. Kent Beck came up with the idea and has written several books on XP and he emphasizes testing and writing test code to validate the actual code you are writing. Beck calls Extreme Programming a "lightweight methodology" that challenges traditional notions of software development process. The basic idea is to start small and building something real that works and move forward while constantly refactoring the code.

I bought the book as a reference guide for Ant and Cactus and found this book to be really well written, easy to read and a great resource even if you don't use XP as your software development practice.

One of the reasons I love this book is because of all the examples and code included in this book. The authors and contributors take real examples and apply Ant, Cactus, JUnit, etc in terms of those real problems making it easy to take the lessons learned and applying them to your projects. I really like the flow of the book - For example, the chapters on Ant begin with some basic information about Ant, what is it, and how to build your xml file to use Ant. You use Ant on a simple example and then move to more complex tasks where you eventually end up building an entire ear file using Ant. The chapters on JUnit and Cactus are also excellent and are written in the similar tutorial fashion. I haven't spent a lot of time looking at the HttpUnit, and JMeter chapters.

Another nice feature of the book is that it includes all of the API and tag references for Ant, Cactus, JUnit, and HttpUnit that takes up over 150 pages. In most cases, I find it annoying when authors pad their books with 100's of pages of API, but I didn't mind it in this case as it's nice to have them available for easy reference.

This book rocks!!! Did you ever get frustrated and alone trying to get the open source dev tools to work? This book ends all of that. It is really marvelous. I have seldom bought a tech book that I was so satisfied with.

Even if you don't subscribe to the XP model of programming this books covers tools that every java programmer must have. Yes the tools are open source but a developer must use the best tools no matter who makes them. I have know about these tools but have not been able to find good docs explaining where, why and how to use them, this book does. This book also covers the real world not some lab or classroom setup.