Johannes Schlüter

One of the things I do quite often is running PHP's regression test suite which is using a custom test format called .phpt. The PHP source distribution, and CVS checkouts, include a nice script for running them called run-tests.php.

run-tests.php gives a summary of failed tests in the end. As a developer I'm now interested for the reasons for the failures. The test system therefore produces a bunch of files, a file containing the expected output, one containing the actual output and a diff between these as relevant files. The problem there is that the diff, for being portable, is using a quite simple machnism which only shows the lines which differ without any context. This makes it quite hard to read. Therefore I usually diff the .exp and .out files myself for doing that I have a few simple shell scripts which I call with the test name and then get a proper diff.

Lately I've changed my way of working and use vim less, I still use it, but I use NetBeans as an IDE more and more. So I thought a bit about that test issue and searched my brain for my Java skills and started playing around to see whether I manage to write a NetBeans plugin which can run the tests and report the results in a usable way. Over the time it looked quite promising, so I registered a launchpad project and imported the code to a repository there. Now I think I've reached a true milestone which should basically work for interested folks. And released a version 0.6.0.

The module registers an menu entry and a toolbar icon to start a wizard. This wizard asks you for the PHP binaries to use and test directory to run. It will then run the tests and open a window with the results of each test. By double clicking or using a context menu you can then get the actual test code and a diff. If you have PHP support installed in NetBeans the code will also be highlighted.

There are still a few issues most importantly you need a special version of run-tests.php, which is bundled, and not all things, like redirect tests, are supported. There are certainly other issues, but the aim is mostly to help me. If you're interested feel free to report a bug and maybe I look into it. If you're brave you can also fetch the code and start hacking it - but keep in mind I'm no Java developer and had no idea what I'm aiming at and how to write NetBeans modules when I started, you can see that in the code

This code requires Java 6 (since I make use of SwingWorker) and I didn't test older NetBeans versions than 6.5 since that version has proper PHP support and there's little sense in having older versions installed.

P.S. The screenshot is a bit faked: The inner windows don't appear exactly like that, yet, but that's the aim and you can easily use Drag'n'Drop inside the IDE to arrange them till I found out how to that from within the code.

I recently wrote a few postings about great Sun stuff. The reason for that? - Well since joining Sun I get all the information about the things Sun does and there are tons of cool things, I enjoy OpenSolaris, especially DTrace and zfs (zfs snapshots!) - these are great pieces of technology. Ok, you can feel that OpenSolaris isn't finished yet, but it's a good step from a classic Unix to a quite usable system.

Now Sun is famous for another product family: Java. For me Java has always been a synonym for ugly and annoying applets and over-engineered "enterprise" applications which are close to being unusable. Being Sun I learned about a new technology for fighting the RIA wars against Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Flex: JavaFX. After browsing a while over the different sites I found out that key part of JavaFX is a declarative scripting language for creating user-interfaces. That sounds quite cool - no annoying and over-verbose XML and no procedural coding for describing a GUI, but a syntax which looks quite sane for that. So I wanted to give it a shot. And that's where the trouble began ...

One more thing out of the category "Java annoys me": In Java you can declare an array like that:

String[] array_of_strings = { "foo", "bar", "baz" };

but you can't do that inside a func call

someMethod({ "foo", "bar", "baz" });

not even when using an explicit cast

someMethod((String[]){ "foo", "bar", "baz" });

A smart compiler should be able to create the same code for both, I agree this can be unreadable, but that should be my choice not the language's choice.</flame>

Der xenjo bemitleidet mich - das finde ich nett. Er erinnert uns auch daran, dass Java für alles mögliche gedacht wurde, wer mehr will: James Gosling, mit dem ich ja im Januar zu Mittag war, hat das letztens auf Video kommentiert.

So genug der Werbung für den Arbeitgeber.

For a university project I have to develop a web based application using Java Enterprise Edition which will be based on Apache Tomcat. Afterdoing some initial setup on my development machine I did some simple tests to see whether everything works. So my first JSP file looked something like this:

Coming from web security I knew this being a XSS security problem since the user data is directly given to the output stream. Of course this is simple test code but as a self proclaqimed web security expert I havbe to think about such issues before even starting with implementation of the real app - even though the real app is just for university. So I browsed through the JEE documentation to find some method to encode HTML output so I asked a few friends with more Java experience and the only solution I found was using Apache Commons' org.apache.commons.lang.StringEscapeUtils which is no part of the JEE framework, a framework which was created with web apps in mind. How can that be? Are JSP based applications supposed to be unsafe? - And people say PHP was unsafe, which really was made for "solving the web problem" and offers all the things you need in it's core API.

Currently I'm at MySQL's staff meeting at Orlando. As you most likely read: Our CEO Marten Mickos announced that SUN is going to buy MySQL AB. I joined MySQL just in October and it's the first time for me to go to a company meeting, so I'm still in some kind of orientation phase, meeting many people where I only knew the name and now the company becomes way bigger. But I'm not only having the chance to meet people from MySQL now, but SUN also sent a bunch of guys over to Orlando, so Ulf, Andrey and me from MySQL's PHP team had James Gosling joining our table at lunch - but I won't go and do Java now, I'll stay with PHP