Only Valid Measure of Code Quality

Image from http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

WTF implies lack of clarity. Clear code is easier to understand, easier to maintain and easier to extend.

Announcing saikuro_treemap — an easy to setup tool to generate complexity treemaps of ruby code.

See a demo for yourself.

Complexity Visualization of Rake

My mom would rather use a mac over a gentoo. A systems admin would rather use redhat over a mac on a production machine.

It is also important to say “NO” to people who are not your users. Almost all software at eclipse.org are frameworks, tools and app servers written primarily for developers.

The way software and API is designed for the developer is different from how it’s developed for the non-developer (most of the times). SWTBot was originally and still is primarily a test-automation tool for use by QAs to automate test cases. The APIs are designed to be extremely intuitive, simple and easy to extend by QAs by merely looking at examples and not having to read API documentation.

Some context is in order if you haven’t had the opportunity to work closely with QAs before. Most QAs I’ve met understand customer requirements, understand the software and what the customers want out of it. I like to treat them as end users of the buggy software I build. They may not understand SWT threading, the eclipse ui and platform, OSGi and how TCP packets travel across the corporate firewall over to a load distributor in front of a cloud hosted at a datacenter on the other side of the continent. Try explaining a “org.eclipse.swt.SWTException: Invalid thread access” to a QA and you’ll get interesting looks.

QAs are good at finding bugs in whatever software they are testing. Testing all of the software is time consuming, not to mention testing backward compatibility with older software. Nobody likes clicking around the same navigation path in the UI all the time.

QAs like exploring interesting ways to use the software and ensure that it works consistently as software evolves over time. The traditional favorites have been the ‘heavy weight’ automation tools like HP’s QTP, IBM’s Rational Robot, Borland’s SilkTest and the open source ‘light weight’ tools like selenium, sahi, and a lot others.

Each of these tools has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the most powerful features of each of these toolchains is the ability to author scripts in a dynamic language. The commercial vendors use vbscript or some other variant of the language, and provide some forms of integration with defect tracking tools. The open source tools are primarily light weight, use the languages like javascript, ruby, python and don’t integrate much with anything but your IDE and things like ant or rake.

The end goal is to make SWTBot an extremely good, open source, light weight tool for QAs to automate tests, and be just about useful for developers to write simple test cases with and not something in between that neither of them like.

As part of evolving SWTBot APIs we need to ensure that we stay true to our goal. This sometimes means saying NO to feature requests and even patches from developers if it hurts the non-developers.

I’m working on creating an open-source functional testing tool for testing SWT apps, I call it SWTBot (which is named after a similar project ABBOT.

SWTBot does work fairly well with most popular SWT controls, barring a few like DateTime (which have different implementation across platforms.) The ACID test for SWTBot would be if it is able to test eclipse itself. I was trying to click on some submenus in the eclipse. Since menu entries among other UI components are lazy loaded, it is very difficult or rather impossible to walk over all UI components, and I was quite stuck with this fundamental problem.

Not for long — Logging on to #eclipse, a few conversations later with Paul, the problem got solved.

Registrations for the Bangalore event have already come to a close down. We’re already sending invites for the Pune event. There’s still some invites left for the Pune event, and you can just about make it if you register quick.

A lot of folks use *nix and the existing CCTray is not much help.

If you wish to use this pre-alpha release, feel free to write back. It’s not all that configurable, so you have been warned

Oh, yes, BTW this release depends on issue #899 of CCNet dashboard, and issue #118 of CC.rb. You can vote for these issues to be resolved to see CCTray in Java released a bit earlier.

Finally a screenshot for those really interested.

On the down side — I’ve to remember all the keyboard shortcuts. This is hardly an option when there are a whole lot of keyboard shortcuts to remember, quite a lot keyboard shortcuts in most IDEs don’t really make much sense, and quite a few features do not even have keyboard shortcuts!

NO LONGER!

This Quick Assist (CTRL+3) feature in the latest version (3.3-M7) of eclipse makes available ALL the UI elements – views, menu entries, even refactorings all in one single place. What’s more it supports CamelCaseCompletion. This combination makes for some kick-ass development.

Keyboard Shortcuts — what’s that ?

Oh yeah, and there’s support for a brand new refactoring — Introduce Parameter Object

He compiles Mozilla on Opensolaris during nights, and has recently been working on getting SWT/Mozilla to work on OpenSolaris-gtk. He aims to eventually contribute eclipse builds for opensolaris. This would also get a lot og SWT based apps like the Google Web Toolkit(GWT) to work on OpenSolaris

You can catch up with him at JavaOne and the Eclipse Party at JavaOne.

Sriram lives here.

ZX says:

…
In the end, this is great news for Eclipse which now gets to interact with a whole new set of users and developers.

Eclipse (OSGi) on clients… devices… servers… , what’s next?
…

OSGi is great on my desktop, laptop, servers, even mobile phones. But lotus notes based on OSGi ? I’m a die hard Eclipse fan and developer. But when it comes to usability of the software that I have to use everyday I’m a tough guy to convince.

For another potshot at this installer (for now) it is about 673 MB, is packaged as a .tar (Anyone at IBM lotus notes packaging team heard about something called as gzip/bzip2?) The documentation (which is about a total of 3MB) comes as a separate download. While it is a good idea to package the documentation separately I wonder if the installer comes with some documentation.

I just hope that I do not have to go through all these pains and musings and some more pains to install Lotus Notes 8. Especially after downloading something that is 673 MB.

This is similar to the paper clip in your favorite office suite: