What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

Wednesday October 20, 2004

Eclipse and Test Driven Development I've got some coding going on in Java, Perl, Python and PHP at the same (thus often self-query frequently: "Oh wait, which language am I working in for this bit?"). I've been using, at least partially, Test Driven Development with my current Java effort and It Is Good.

I've used Eclipse extensively in the past but since there was kinduva a long hiatus in Java development for me, it felt both novel and familiar to install it on my powerbook for the stuff I'm currently working on. I think that liberated feeling of knowing that That Thing Works So I Can Move On Now is referred to as being "Test Infected." Which, unlike the flu, is a good kind of infection. One of the things I've been trying to be more consistent about is writing tests prior to, or if not, concurrently with, application code. I strongly recommend reading Kent Beck's Test Driven Development (who BTW appears to have a work in progress about Eclipse), TDD is a quick read but more than any particular valuable agile techniques per se it offers a good outlook on how to think about what you're doing when you sit down to write code.

Well, I was writing a few initial test cases for a class I was working on and noticed something new (to me anyway) when I clicked on an error that Eclipse flagged. The non-existence of the method in the called class was identified and Eclipse offered to stub it out on my behalf, this is a huge win as far as expressing an API in a test case and continuously filling in the functionality development "TODO" list. Everytime I want to add a new public method, I'll write a new test case and let Eclipse bootstrap the implementation.

Read it:	Now if I could get that level of simplicity and automation working with Perl, Python or PHP, I'd be jammin'! Sure, there are testing frameworks for each of these but Eclipse really streamlines that whole TDD cycle.