EasyMock generic typing

These days, I’m a bit annoyed about Java generics. Because it seems that when you want to be clean, you pretty much always get in troubles.

I’ll give you an example. The method to create a mock with EasyMock is currently typed like this:

public static <T> T mock(Class<T> toMock)

This seems quite straightforward.

But it is also quite annoying to use. For example, let’s try to mock a generic type:

List<String> list = mock(List.class);

It looks like something we would like to easily do but you get this nice warning:

Warning:(51, 33) java: unchecked conversion
  required: java.util.List<java.lang.String>
  found:    java.util.List

And there’s no way to get around it. Here are some attempts:

List<String> list = mock(List<String>.class); // no allowed (won't compile)
List<String> list = EasyMock.<String>mock(List.class); // won't compile either because the parameter type doesn't match)
List<String> list = (List<String>) mock(List.class); // still get a warning

So what’s the way out?

To be less accurate.

Yes. I can’t see any other way out. (Do you?)

So my plan is to change EasyMock typing with this:

public static <T> T mock(Class<?> toMock)

No relation anymore between the parameter and the returned type. WAT!!! Are you crazy?!?

So yes, this will compile without complaints :-( (but I can check the type coherence at runtime)

String list = mock(Integer.class);

But this will now work without any warning :-)

List<String> list = mock(List.class);

You can’t have your cake and eat it it seems. But as usual, I will be happy to be proved wrong.

Gatling Java DSL

My favorite stress tool has been Gatling for many years now.

Scenarios are

• Easy to construct, It’s just code
• Easy to version. It’s just code
• Easy to run. It’s a simple command line that you launch in remote if needed
• Having great result graphs
• Easy to datamine. There is a simulation.log file that let’s you do some more digging when needed

My only complaints are

• You can’t change the running scenario
• It’s in Scala

The first one might be addressed by Gatling Frontline. I haven’t tried.

The second one is a bit more complicated to solve :-)

In fact, I don’t care that’s in Scala. But I would love to be able to core my scenario in Java.

So just for fun, I did a thought experiment. I’ve coded the Gatling API in Java and then coded the BasicScenario example using this API.

It’s not working for real

The API is just an emply shell. To know how different it would be from the Scala DSL.

The answer is: Not much.

My expectations were that I would need to rely on plenty of Java 8 features to get something close to the Scala DSl. But in fact, not even.

The main differences are:

• Variables are typed
• I’ve added a build method. But it’s just for style. I can get rid of it
• A bunch of semi-colons
• No syntactic sugar to create a map
• I’m using Duration is used to time units
• I need a run method where the setUp method is

That’s quite joyful and probably can be improved.

I’m now wondering if I could have used the Scala classes directly. I’m not good at making Java and Scala interacting.

So if someone is and want to try, please do so.

Manage emails in git

If you are like me, you tend to work on open source using your personal email and at YP using your enterprise email. But git doesn’t handle that well so you need to never forget to do

git config user.email henri.tremblay@somewhere.com

after each git init or git clone.

I finally had the time for work on an almost satisfying solution.

EasyMock 3.4 is out!

This version has finally removed the old (and ugly) partial mocking methods. You are now required to use the partialMockBuilder.

In exchange, you get really nice short methods to create your mocks: mock, niceMock and strictMock.

You also get a better stability since cglib and ASM are now embedded to remove a possible version mismatch with your own dependencies. Note that Objenesis will stay as an explicit dependency.

Change log

• #163 Incomplete sentence in documentation bug website
• #160 EasyMock should not depend on ASM but inline the code enhancement major
• #159 Remove partial mocking deprecated methods enhancement fixed major
• #158 Shorter mock methods core enhancement fixed major
• #155 Disable jar indexing enhancement fixed minor
• #11 User guide refers to methods not in latest release website

Out of SourceForge, all in Bintray

API_KEY=xxx
PASSPHRASE=xxx

# This is because I want the file upside down to create the older versions first
tail -r $1 > tmp.tsv

while read p; do
  version=$(echo "$p" | cut -d' ' -f1)
  date=$(echo "$p" | cut -d' ' -f2) 
  
  version=${version// /-}

  echo $version $date
  
  content="{ \"name\": \"$version\", \"desc\": \"$version\", \"released\": \"${date}T00:00:00.000Z\", \"github_use_tag_release_notes\": false, \"vcs_tag\": \"$version\" }"
  echo "$content"
  
  curl -v -XPOST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "X-GPG-PASSPHRASE: ${PASSPHRASE}" -uhenri-tremblay:${API_KEY} \
 -d "$content" \
    https://api.bintray.com/packages/easymock/distributions/easymock/versions

done <tmp.tsv

Migrating EasyMock Jira to GitHub

Virtual goods are still mine: Open letter to The Economist

Finish migrating Objenesis to GitHub

With Codehaus and Google Code closing, I’m happily required to migrate Objenesis and EasyMock.

Both projects have an hybrid hosting using different platforms. I’ve decided to start with Objenesis which is easier to migrate. I’ll describe the process in this post. Hopefully, it will be helpful to someone but, in fact, I’m also looking forward to your feedback to see if I can improve my final setup.

So, Objenesis source code was originally on Google Code. I’ve moved it to GitHub some years ago mainly because pull requests are awesome. The website is also a GitHub page. Part of the documentation is on Google Code wiki, the binaries are on Google Code as well as the issue tracker.

Google being nice folks, they used to provide a nice way (https://code.google.com/export-to-github, now down) to migrate everything to GitHub. But I couldn’t use that because

• I don’t want the project to end up in henri-tremblay/objenesis. I want it where it is now, in the EasyMock organisation
• I only want to migrate the wiki and the issues since the sources are already there

So here’s what I did instead.

Issue tracker

The issue tracker was migrated using the IssueExporterTool. It worked perfectly (but is a bit slow as advertised).

Wiki pages

At first, I tried to export the entire Objenesis project to Github to be able to retrieve the wiki pages and then move them to the real source code. The result was quite bad because the tables are not rendered correctly. So I ended up manually migrating each page to markdown. There was only 3 pages so it wasn’t too bad.

Binaries

This was more complicated. Maven binaries are already deployed through the Sonatype Nexus. But I needed to migrate the standalone bundles. I’ve looked into three options:

• GitHub releases
• Bintray
• Both (GitHub releases exported to Bintray)

GitHub releases are created automatically when you tag in git. But you also seem to be able to add some release notes and binaries over that. I didn’t want to dig too much into it. I knew I wanted to be in Bintray in the end. And I wanted easy automation. Bintray was easy to use so I went for Bintray only. Be aware, the way I did the migration is low-tech (but works).

1. Make a list of all the binaries to migrate
   • Get them with wget https://objenesis.googlecode.com/files/objenesis-xxx.zip
2. Create an organisation, a distribution repository and an [objenesis package])(https://bintray.com/easymock/distributions/objenesis) in Bintray
3. Add my GPG key to my Bintray account
4. Upload everything using REST (curl -T objenesis-xxx.zip -H "X-GPG-PASSPHRASE: ${PASSPHRASE}" -uhenri-tremblay:${API_KEY} https://api.bintray.com/content/easymock/distributions/objenesis/xxx/objenesis-xxx-bin.zip?publish=1)

It works, the only drawback is that no release notes are provided. They’ve always been on the website

Project moved

Finally, I’ve set the “Project Moved” flag to target GitHub. This quite aggressively redirects you to GitHub if you try to access https://code.google.com/p/objenesis.

What I learned today

Microbenchmarking is fun