Arquillian Blog

Kick-off

Each project represented at Hackergarten briefly introduced itself and presented ideas to hack on. The presence of Red Hat community projects was very strong (~75%). We’re happy to report that there was lots of interest in Arquillian. It received the most votes for hacking, with JBoss Forge drawing in the second most.

General impressions

The Hackergarten was held in open areas at the back of the pavilion. The areas gave plenty of privacy, but also gave people freedom to move around. We didn’t have to experience that awkwardness of peeking through a door or the distraction of doors opening and closing. We were able to do demos in one section without affecting hacks or discussions going on in other sections because there was enough ambient noise, mostly music from the trade floor. The wired connections provided by switches at each table removed the distraction of getting on wifi, although it took a bit of time and some shuffling around in the morning to figure all that out.

Once we knew to get everyone plugged into the switches, we were off to the hacking races!

Pictures!

See more pictures in Album 1 and Album 2.

Activity Stream (related to testing)

• At the start of the event, I suggested the hack idea to integrate Arquilliun Drone and FluentLenium to Jan Papoušek
  • Jan and I introduced ourselves to Mathilde Lemee and they got to work on the integration straight away, starting off by sharing with each other how their respective projects worked.
  • By days end, they completed a working integration
  • Mathilde also integrated FluentLenium with Thucydides (“2 CDs”); stay tuned because that integration and the integration with Drone may become one and the same
  • In both cases, the integration with FluentLenium was so straightforward (and thus hackable) because of the nice abstraction layer Mathilde created that handled bootstrapping FluentLenium
• Aslak hacked with Hans Dockter, creator of Gradle, on a gradle deployment plugin that uses Arquillian Containers to handle life cycle of dozens of containers (application servers, servlet containers and beyond)
• Bartosz Majsak hacked on a demo for Arquillian Ape and enhanced Arquillian Transaction to work both in-container and embedded
• I spoke with two of the IntelliJ developers (Peter and Yann) about:
  • a plugin for Arquillian (similar to the Eclipse Arquillian plugin)
  • adding an embedded Forge shell with UI interplay (similar to the JBoss Forge view in JBoss Tools)
• I chatted with Julien Viet about:
  • use of Arquillian for testing portlets in isolation and within the portal container
  • treating the web browser as a “container” to incorporate JavaScript testing into a Drone test (prototype, proposal)
• Later in the day, Julien gave a presentation and demo of Juzu, excited to say it’s tested w/ Arquillian Core and Arquillian Drone
• I brainstormed with Geoffrey De Smet, lead of Drools Planner, about:
  • using rules to handle the filtering decision for tests
  • the role decision tables can play in declaring conditions for which tests to run
  • optimizing test suite execution using Drools Planner and distributing tests over a grid
• I spoke with John Smart about Arquillian Core and Arquillian Drone integration with Thucydides
  • We discussed how much the two projects align and what it would take to integrate
  • We concluded the first step is adding a bootstrap API in Thucydides, which he began to flesh out, that could be hooked to the Arquillian event model and all the integrations with individual test runners can be done once in Arquillian
  • We talked about how Drone could likely provide management of WebDriver
  • John Smart has been busy all week working on a bootstrap API for Thucydides (hacking on it with an ATDD approach, of course)
• Koen Aers gave a demonstration of the JBoss Forge integration in JBoss Tools, talked about each of elements it brings to the Forge experience in the IDE
  • Koen wrote his first “Hello, World” IntelliJ plugin to get spun up and prepare to help with the integration
  • IntelliJ said they would put it on their roadmap and support the effort where possible
• Alex Soto and Bartosz discussed integrating NoSQLUnit into Arquillian Ape (peristence extension)
  • These projects closely align and it pushes Arquillian’s definition of container management forward
  • I told Marek Jelen about Alex’s NoSQLUnit demo of testing MongoDB on OpenShift through the port forwarding setup by JBoss Tools; a blog entry may be in the works;
  • Arquillian + NoSQLUnit has lots of application, one of which may be testing NoSQL backends in the Infinispan project
• Alexis Hassler was busy improving the Arquillian adapter for CloudBees by adding EJB injection support.
• Aslak discussed with JAX-RS lead about using Arquillian for JAX-RS TCK; not likely soon, but Jersey is entertaining idea of using Arquillian to test Jersey (JAX-RS reference implementation)
• I spoke with Paul Bakker briefly about combining the Forge Arquillian plugin and the Forge Arquillian Extension plugin into one code base
• I brainstormed with David Blevins, lead of TomEE, about the role a test suite can play in the early and in-progress development of a specification
  • proposed idea of using a ATDD approach where tests could be not only marked as pending (before a ref impl is in place), but also proposed, open question and alternative
  • agreed that using tests can focus the discussion about the spec, clarify ambiguities & resolve different interpretations
  • John Smart gave a demo of Thucydides and we contemplated using it for the CDI test suite

Wrap-up

As the event wound down, I discussed with Andres Almiray, who organized the Hackergarten, about what went on during the day, whether Hackergarten accomplished his goals. He talked about the importance of giving people a chance to make a concrete contribution, give them a win to take home with them, lower perception of a barrier to contributing. I talked to him about the fact that Hackergarten is a catalyst for ideas, some of which come into play before the event, already successful and is also ongoing throughout the week, so we’ll only know total impact once conference is over. Some ideas take time to soak. I can attest, we’re still hacking ;)

Finally, Arquillian was invited to join the Nighthacking Tour hosted by Steven Chin on on Wednesday night, so look for that coverage when it comes online.

What people were tweeting…

• Bartosz Majsak (@majson) posted: #devoxx #arquillian @aslakknutsen you have some pull requests
• Markus Eisele (@myfear) posted: What could be the next cool #Arquillian feature? creative @aslakknutsen at the #hackergarden http://twitpic.com/bcv2lv
• Alexis Hassler (@AlexisHassler) posted: GREEN BAR on my #arquillian test. Cloudbees Container Adapter is getting further, thanks to @majson & @aslakknutsen
• Aslak Knutsen (@aslakknutsen) posted: Hacking #Arquillian Container control plugin for #SBT & #Leiningen. #Gradle next…
• Jan Papousek (@jan_papousek) posted: @MathildeLemee the first attempt of integration FluentLenium and Arquillian is here https://github.com/papousek/arquillian-extension-fluentlenium
• Mathilde Lemee (@MathildeLemee) posted: integrating FluentLenium to Arquillian Drone with @jan_papousek
• John Smart (@wakaleo) posted: Awesome concentrated hacking session with @MathildeLemee: integrating #thucydides and FluentLenium in less than 10 lines of code.
• Alex Soto (@alexsotob) posted: @majson Back home ty Arquillian guys for treat me as one of your team

It’s no suprise we’re obsessed with testing here in the Arquillian Galaxy. We’re eternally interested in sharpening our testing weapons, learning about tools that advance the frontline against the bugs, and discovering all the deep, dark code caves where bugs try to hide from testers.

This year, Devoxx, one of the premier Java developer conferences, is bringing together a large group of testing experts. Listed below are just some of the labs, workshops, and BOFs being presented at Devoxx that will enhance your bug hunting skills.

Monday, November 12, 2012

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Thursday, November 15, 2012

We look forword to hearing what testing tools, techniques and strategies you discover at Devoxx 2012.

It was quite a busy fall touring around presenting our ideas, having meetings and hooking up with our awesome community. It’s time to give the ones we missed a little insight into what’s been going on.

JavaZone – Olso – Sep 7-8

The first event this fall was near and dear to me, not only was it in my home town but also my first public presentation in Oslo. Andrew and I had great fun presenting at JavaZone, and I must say, JavaZone is probably one of the most well organized conferences I’ve ever been to. Just to give a tip to other conference organizers out there; A single baguette is not food for a warrior. And when it’s served in a 1 hour time frame to 1.500 people it tends to create queues. But not at JavaZone, where they had 7 sponsored ‘restaurants’ open all day, serving everything from sushi to traditional Norwegian elk stew. That’s the way to do it!

JavaZone started a few years back with something they call Journey-Zone: A trip for the speakers after the conference. This year the target was the MIT Fab-Lab near Tromsø in north of Norway. We headed up there on Thursday afternoon and headed back on Sunday. Hiking in the mountains, fishing in the fjords and hacking was a refreshing combination. The MIT Lab had a laser printer. Which to be honest, took most of our attention. Anything with a flat’ish surface got branded that weekend: ipads, iphones, androids, lenovos, rocks, etc. You name it, they branded it. Rumors had it they only let us play with the laser printer in hopes we wouldn’t discover their hidden Hadron Collider.

The presentation can be seen on Vimeo, Testable Enterprise Development with Arquillian.

JBoss Face2Face – Toronto Sep 12-19

Next morning I headed of to Toronto Canada for a face2face meeting with the JBoss ‘Seam’ team. ‘Seam’ team being the Seam + Richfaces + Forge + Tools + Errai developers pluss qa. We spent a week on a little island outside of Toronto in a old school building.

The general theme being: Ignore all current technical constraints. How would we want X to work? ….. then, go make it so… :)

Being that all colleagues that I interact with on a day to day basis are located in a different parts of the world, it’s always fun to come together at conferences or team meeting to meet them face 2 face. Some even for the first time.

On Thursday during the Toronto week we had arranged a JBoss BOF at the Toronto JUG. Nice group of people showed up!

During the Toronto week we released: Arquillian Core 1.0.0.CR5.

JavaOne – San Francisco – Oct 1-10

After many weeks of hectic preparation the time was upon us, JavaOne. About 11 of us rented two huge apartments to camp for the week. Having a apartment with your colleagues compared to having individual hotels rooms, made this a completely different experience. Much more fun! Making food in our own kitchen, hacking all night…

We had a brand new talk in our deck, The Extendable Enterprise Test Framework – The Arquillian SPI talk. It still needed some tweaking before presenting, so hell broke loose just before hell really broke loose. Dan and I had about 6 hours of sleep the weekend before the conference started and it didn’t really get much better during the conference. Tough week.

But, on Sunday 2. October, my birthday, JavaOne kicked of with the Duke Choice Awards. We made all aliens around the universe proud when Arquillian won the Duke Choice Awards for “Most Innovative Integration Testing Software” of 2011.

We had our new “The Extendable Exterprise TestFramwork” session on Monday and the main Arquillian event “Real Java Enterprise Testing” on Tuesday. Andrew joined in on the Tuesday session which was great fun. Probably the most exiting talk we’ve had so far. Good engaged audience. When we were about to leave the room after the talk, the security/door lady came over to thank us for a good session. She was so exited. In her own words (as I remember them: “There has been a lot of good talks in this room, but this one was the best I’ve ever seen! 3 young handsome energetic guys on stage, had the audience in your hands from the first second. I was out here trying to find more room in the back for more people.”

The audience spoke up and based on their feedback we got named JavaOne 2011 Rock Stars. Thank you!

(Last year Dan and Andrew’s became JavaOne 2010 Rock Stars for their Arquillian presentation, making it two years in a row! We’re aiming for a hat trick.)

Wednesday was the JBoss party, where Arquillian again was center stage. After sliding down to the bar at Slide you were met by a ocean of Rocking Ike’s!

One of the talks from the JBoss Booth mini theater can be found at Vimeo, High Octane Development. The rest should appear on parleys.com soon.

Goto – Århus Danmark – Oct 11-12

The plan was to come more or less directly from San Fransisco to Århus Danmark for Goto, but it became a bit more then less due to Airline mess. We came from San Fransisco and landed in Frankfurt on Monday evening. The United flight was already delayed out of San Fransisco, so we missed our connecting flight to Oslo. And the next flight was full, and so was the next one after that. We ended up having to spend the night in Frankfurt at the airport hotel. The next morning we got tickets to Oslo, but at that point there was no longer a point in going to Oslo since I needed to be in Århus that very same day. With luck I got Lufthansa to rebook my flight to Copenhagen instead.

I finally ended up in Århus at about 9 pm the 11. I call the hotel to verify my booking, for then to head directly down town to meet some of the new Red Hat Danmark people. After some time, I headed out to the hotel to find that they had overbooked and had no room for me. Back and forth, a few hours later I was in bed at a different hotel, roughly 2 am. sigh

To a small audience I pulled up the last energy I had and presented, High Octane Development: JBoss AS 7 with Arquillian. All in all considering I had a cold from San Fransisco, not to bad… :)

JUDCon – London – Oct 30-Nov 1

The 4th JUDCon was held in London, United Kingdom. We kicked of JUDCon with the Arquillian Extensions talk, being the first talk of the day, to a filled room of exited developers.

As always, this was great opportunity to meet up with the community. We ran into long time ShrinkWrap and Arquillian contributor David D’Alto for the first time. Always nice to see the face behind the cartoon character.

I had to cut JUDCon short to head over to Moscow and invade the old iron curtain.

CEE SECR – Moscow – Nov 1-4

At this point my passport was getting a bit too warn, so the airport crew in Stokholm didn’t let me pass boarding without a little discussion that ended in: Let’s give it a try! We can always fly him back.

Well, the Russian immigration lady was not impressed with my passport at all. After studying it multiple times and discussing with colleagues back and forth, I was let through after being given the evil eye and a clear message: Change passports!

Conclusion: You can get quite far with just a smile and puppy eyes. :)

This being the first time in Russia, it was quite fun riding around on the Metro in the morning trying to find the conference when you can’t tell the difference between a station name and a exit sign! But the Moscow Metro is really impressive, a massive deep underground art gallery. Even though I was lost, it was all in all quite a nice morning being that this was where I ended up:

I personally didn’t get much out of the sessions since most of them were in Russian. And as we know from previous experience, Russian is not my strong side.

I have to send out a sorry to the audience at my session which had the pleasure of experiencing my worst talk to date! Due to technical issues (HDMI only projectors? first conference ever!) I had to improvise last minute and do a demo less session on a Russian language windows 7 laptop over a flaky conference network. It could have gone smoother to say the least.

On the bright side, we did manage to release Arquillian Weblogic support during the conference. Thank you, Vineet Reynolds, for the contribution!

Devoxx – Antwerpen – Nov 15-18

Then off to the last stop of the this years tour, Devoxx! Devoxx being one of the largest European Java conference, with massive cinema session rooms and thousands of people, we were up for a fun week.

During a Hackfest we had a long chat with John Ferguson Smart, the creator of Thucydides. Thucydides is a reporting tool for ATDD based on Selenium. The outcome boils down to: He wants to focus on reporting and not so much runtime, while we focus on runtime and leave reporting to others. A match made in heaven. More to come on this later.

We had the pleasure of meeting Bartosz Majsak, another long Arquillian/ShrinkWrap support, for the first time. The combination of sleep deprivation and Belgium beer seemed to do wonders with our creativity. The later in the week, the odder the idea. It’s going to be fun implementing some of this in the upcoming months.

During the week we found the time to do the first release of: Arquillian Extension Persistence 1.0.0.Alpha1. Thank you, Bartosz Majsak, for the contribution!

You can see the recorded version of the Arquillian Extensions talk on parleys.com.

’til next time…

Mark the date, October 2, 2011: Arquillian wins a Duke’s Choice Award for Innovative Integration Testing at JavaOne 2011!

Is there a better way to start of a though week then to get a solid acknowledgement for the hardwork that you have already put in? I can’t think of any…

Members of the Arquillian team receiving the Duke’s Choice Award (Andrew Lee Rubinger, Dan Allen and Aslak Knutsen).

We accept this award as an ongoing challenge to innovate. We’ll continue our mission to explore strange new testing gaps, seek out new integration points and boldly go where no integration testing software has gone before. This award goes out to the entire Arquillian community: coders, bloggers and evangelists. Excellent work!

After receiving the award, we were invited as guests on the Java Spotlight podcast, which was recorded on site at JavaOne, to talk about Arquillian. You can find our interview at 11:02 into Episode 51 in the series.

We’d also like to congratulate the other Duke’s Choice Award winners as well: dooApp, Inductive Automation, jHome, JFrog, JRebel, LMAX, Rockwell Automation and one of our own, Netty. Great work! Duke certainly made some great choices this year.

Last month, the Arquillian developers got together at Red Hat Summit / JBossWorld 2010, hosted at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston, to Experience Open Source with our community.

We asked the community what they wanted to hear about at JUDCon. Survey said…“Arquillian.” So we unleashed Ike and his fleet of testable containers onto JUDCon and JBoss World.

While Arquillian only appeared twice on the official schedule—once at JUDCon, presented by Aslak and myself, and once at JBoss World, presented by ALR—it managed to make an appearance every hour, in one form or another (including bar discussions). Thanks for encouraging him with all the votes!

On the eve of JUDCon, three of the Arquillian ringleaders (Aslak, ALR and Dan) met up at Harvard Square bar for the Boston JBUG to devise a plan to make testing a main focal point of the weeklong conference event:

Not letting a moment slip by, Arquillian led off the community track at JUDCon early the next morning.

Aslak and I wanted to leave a strong impression on the audience. So instead of going on about theory, we prepared a talk on the future of Java EE testing that can be summed up as: demo, demo, demo, demo. With me driving the commands (doing my best to type on a Norwegian keyboard layout), Aslak pointed at the screen and, in a flash, showed how Arquillian can make child’s play out of testing EJBs, JMS, JAX-RS, JPA and even JSF.

While we’ve come a long way with Arquillian, presenting always gets us thinking of other things we can do with it. (Notice Aslak sporting the black Arquillian shirt).

Ike didn’t want to get stuck inside the computer the whole conference, so we printed him on a bunch of shirts and buttons to give away. Our plan was almost foiled because of my absentmindedness, but it was saved when my wife delivered the “bag of goodies” just as the talk was ending. We spread the Arquillian swag around and it scattered off to invade other talks and strike up conversations.

Everytime you turned around, Ike was hitching a ride on someone’s backpack.

Making his second apparence on the JBoss Community Asylum, this time under the JBoss moniker, Aslak explained how Arquillian makes the task of testing Java EE applications simple and possible. This would be one of many trips to the microphone throughout the week. But this time, he caught some grief from the jokester hosts poking fun at the project name:

Who is Hark William? Is he a country singer or some sort of character from Star Wars?

Aslak set the record straight.

His name is Ike. And he’s from Hollywood. He’s an alien that controls everything inside his little world.

If Ike could speak, he would have simply issued the warning:

Don’t mock me.

He must have left quite an impression, because the host immediately credited Arquillian as having “a couple of talks today.” Sure, that’s how we remember it too

Even though the Arquillian team only had one talk at JUDCon, we did have a front row seat in the Code generation world premiere presented by Jesper Pedersen from the IronJacamar Team, showing of their shiny new tool for JCA adaptor source code generation with full Arquillian test support.

So what’s the Arquillian project status? “Alpha3 is coming soon. And more containers.” (Little did they know, three containers would be added later that night).

The podcast had interrupted the JUDCon hackfest. It then proceeded to ultimately disrupt the hackfest when Emmanuel announced at the top of the hour,

Let’s go get some beers.

So all the talk of a hackfest ended up being just that, talk. But wait, not those hard-core Arquillian developers. They’re the only ones that stuck around, pressing on even in the absense of beer.

“Why?” you ask. Because we were hell-bent on getting the Tomcat and Jetty container integrations working. I did the Jetty integration while Jean Deruelle worked on the one for Tomcat. Lincoln Baxter III looked up from his work laying down the foundation for JBoss Forge.

Once we both got green bars, we finally called it a night and headed out for a round of drinks to celebrate.

We took a break the next afternoon to check out the sights and sounds of downtown Boston, which could be seen off in the distance from the conference center.

That evening I headed over to the Red Hat Summit kickoff at the pavilion for my booth duty. Ken Gullaksen, one of our top community members, snapped a shot of me sporting our cool Arquillian desktop wallpaper on my Android phone.

Fashioning the Arquillian button, I was soon approached by an attendee who asked me if I had any extra. I asked him if he knew what they were for. He replied,

No. But it looks really cool.

Ike, such a developer magnet ~;)

At some point we made our way from the conference center to a bar downtown. Like always, I’m in the bar ranting on about some technology, probably Maven:

We were up early the next morning for the second Arquillian charge. ALR kicked off the conference by showing how developers can achieve rapid development with Enterprise Java by throwing complexity over the wall and using ShrinkWrap and Arquillian, while at the same time Mark Little, our director, was in the other room explaining how Arquillian fits into our strategy in his JBoss State of the Union address.

Arquillian is central to the evolution of platfoms & relevant for development.

To put it more bluntly, he slipped out,

You need to test the hell out of things.

We agree ~:)

Handling all that complexity for the developer is hard work, though. It really took it’s toll on ALR,

Arquillian got a mention in the joint RichFaces 4 / Seam Faces talk and the Seam 3: State of Union talk. All the activity had the developers’ interest piqued. When Pete Muir asked during the the JBoss Developer Story BOF what people wanted to hear more about, someone called out,

I want to hear more about the testing tool.

Once again, Aslak was called to the mic to showcase Arquillian. The timing was excellent because Burr Sutter, who is currently focused on improving the developer experience, witnessed first-hand how desperately this tool is needed. Afterwards, I said to him,

It’s like we just showed up with food to a starving country.

And what are they asking for? More.

Until we meet up again, we’ll be hard at work making testing as easy and powerful as possible. That means working closely with our tools guy, Max Andersen (left).

Ike sure had a big week. So at the end of it all, we bought him a drink (at Drink).

The Arquillian forums are really heating up! Community participation is what makes the success of Arquillian possible. Keep it up folks!

Conference photos | More conference photos | Arquillian swag