Software Area
19/Jan/2005, 00:45 CET
This is my particular list of "Most Valuable Players" in the java development arena.
Is not a chart of best featured tools, or best selling products, or most popular stuff. It is just the software I return to on every new java project I do. By the way, it's all Open Software. And, maybe best of all, Free Software; both free "as in beer" and "free as in speech". For those of you that thought "what a stupid sentence", please find the rationale behind it here
The stress testing tool. I love it since I first met, some years ago...
I was working for Netscape as professional services consultant, and needed to do some stress testing on
an application deployed at a customer's facility. As it uses to be even today, the customer didn't have any idea of what
the h*** a stress test could be, but he was complaining about the speed of the application...well the lack
of speed, to be true. Not the best moment to ask for some money to add to the budget to buy some stress tool... oops.
So there I was, alone in the middle of a crisis, with nothing in my hands to protect my dignity...again.
And then suddenly, from the sacred lands of google came the answer to my question, the solution to my problem...
the first free, completely open source stress tool! JMeter! That night I started believing again.
Jokes apart, I love JMeter and I have performed some stress tests on real production systems in the las t years. You can find more info on my experiences with JMeter here.
JUnit is a regression testing framework written by Erich Gamma and Kent Beck. It is used by the developer who implements unit tests in Java.
Written in Java, HttpUnit emulates the relevant portions of browser behavior, including form submission, JavaScript, basic http authentication, cookies and automatic page redirection, and allows Java test code to examine returned pages either as text, an XML DOM, or containers of forms, tables, and links. When combined with a framework such as JUnit, it is fairly easy to write tests that very quickly verify the functioning of a web site.
Cactus is a simple test framework for unit testing server-side java code (Servlets, EJBs, Tag Libs, Filters, ...). The intent of Cactus is to lower the cost of writing tests for server-side code. It uses JUnit and extends it. Cactus implements an in-container strategy, meaning that tests are executed inside the container.
Eclipse is a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular.
Well, of course nothing like vi to write code, but if I ever changed to a graphical IDE I should choose Eclipse.
Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, but without Make's wrinkles.
No java project is a java project until it is under "ant control".
