I came across a possible mock framework for JSF from the Shale team. Since I’m about to try helping my folks with some JSF projects and getting them to do actual TDD, this may be a big help.

There’s been quite a stir over some documentation on MSDN about how to do TDD with Visual Studio 2005. Essentially it advocated writing all your tests first for a a particular class and then starting to implement the tests and get them to pass one by one. Sort of Big Design Up Front with Tests. Gee, might as well do a lot of UML diagrams and get the same effect. Basically what they were advocating was a TDD anti-pattern.

Anyway the community spoke up pretty quickly and loudly including Michael Feathers, Ron Jeffries, James Shore, and others. So it’s gone now and this is the Microsoft explanation.

Fairly impressive that this got changed so quickly.

I’ve been playing around with Ruby a bit as a break from things. Pulled down a nice Eclipse plug-in today, Ruby Development Tools. Basically covers everything but auto-completion and refactorings. OK, those are pretty big things, but it’s nicer than BBEdit and a Ruby plugin.

I really like the fact that unit testing support is built into the base language.

Two of our senior developers vented on JSF to me today. We’ve been using JSF on two projects now for about a month and a half and the experiment hasn’t been going so well despite the marketing hype. One developer explained that he wanted to implement a simple templating solution using Tiles. Turns out you can’t forward directly to the tiles, like in Struts. So there’s probably another option or some way to workaround this, but it can’t leverage well known solutions easily.

Then another developer on our other project explained that the JSF parts were driving them nuts with debugging hell. They tried to implement an AJAX style auto complete in a text field. Unfortunately the JSF pages keep having a problem somewhere, but there’s no real debugging output. Just press the submit button and nothing happens. JSF swallows the exceptions in a lot of cases and doesn’t output any sort of useful error message.

Of course these are anecdotal evidence, and they probably have at least some sort of workaround, but it does point out that JSF has not been an easy or productive adoption so far at least for our shop. Of course tomorrow I’ll be doing some pairing on one of these projects so I’ll get to understand the issues a little more first hand.

“Oh, if we’re going to hook the project up to cruisecontrol I better write some tests.” –An Unnamed Developer

I’m not sure the fact that I spent a day doing a class on TDD last week has completely sunk in. Tomorrow I hook up cruisecontrol and maybe do some pairing so we can make some progress on this front. Maybe it’s time to invoke harsh measures and start failing the projects for not enough test coverage. I might feel like an ogre, but at least I’ll be a test first ogre.