These days there is good amount of debate on the efficacy of the automated acceptance tests. Many have started believing that current way of acceptance testing is a waste as it doesn’t provide you the relevant ROI as you’d expect from it. People have provided some alternatives also, but to me they look very subjective where you’ll always prompt with – “it depends”. In this post, I am not going to talk about yet another alternative of automated acceptance testing, but rather will put some practical facts based on our project experience that worked for us.
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QuickTip: Passwordless login to localhost on Ubuntu
Make sure you installed openssh with following command:
sudo apt-get install openssh-server
If you have not generated an ssh keypair on your client, type
ssh-keygen -t dsa
In your $HOME/.ssh directory, create a file authorized_keys if not existing:
~/.ssh: touch authorized_keys
~/.ssh: chmod 600 authorized_keys
Copy the public key into the authorized_keys file:
~/.ssh: cat id_dsa.pub >> authorized_keys
You should be ready to go now using “ssh localhost”
QuickTip: Playing .flv files on Ubuntu
I downloaded some video presentations in .flv format and I struggled a bit to find right and the best player to run them. Ubuntu movie player complained even after installing certain updates. Finally I realized the best choice on Windows (Adobe Media player) should work on Ubuntu as well as it’s Adobe AIR based. To be able to install it, first you need to install Adobe AIR followed by Adobe Media player installation. The result is simply awesome.
First Look At Maven 3
After hearing a lot of good things about upcoming Maven 3 but not getting any stable release, I thought I should give it a try with its early snapshot. So I downloaded it from its svn repo. As I was a bit impatient, without looking at instructions I built it using ANT. Later I realized that I could also do it using existing version of maven. After building it, I thought I should give it a try on my existing project and here are a few observations.
- Maven 3 has been designed to be backward compatible and it worked nicely for my project with minor hicups.
- Initially I thought it’s my misconception, but guys, here’s a good news – it’s much faster than Maven 2.
- It’s more verbose (for better) and provides information (relevant plugin and associated goal) on each step being executed
- It doesn’t seem to like to redundant information anymore. I had duplicate dependency in my pom.xml which used to work in Maven 2. Maven 3 doesn’t allow it.
- While working with it, I simply loved its feature of restartability. In Maven 2, if your test case fails, you have to start all over again. In Maven 3, you can restart from where you left after fixing the test which (I know you already figured out) is a great time saver. Here is an example:
[ERROR] After correcting the problems, you can resume the build with the command
[ERROR] mvn <goals> -rf :elmar-import-incr
Ubuntu QuickTip: sudo ant doesn’t work!
Today I picked up latest sources of Maven3 from its svn repo and started building it on Ubuntu. As part of the build, you need to run “ant” command which at the end tries to copy stuff to /usr/ directory for which it didn’t have access. So I tried running “sudo ant” and it started giving me exceptions like “JAVA_HOME is not defined correctly” which to my knowledge I exported correctly in my $HOME/.bashrc. After some research I found that while working with “sudo” you need to pass environment variables along with command itself. Something like this:
sudo env JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_HOME ant