Exposing PostgreSQL on vagrant to host OS

I've been working with vagrant lately on a Ruby project and I wanted to the ability to view the PostgreSQL database on the vagrant image through DbVisualizer on my OS X system. This is quite easy to set up in PostgreSQL and vagrant.

1. Add a port forwarding entry to your Vagrantfile: config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 5432, host: 15432. I'm using Vagrant 1.6.3 here. Start/restart your Vagrant image.
2. Edit the pg_hba.conf file on the vagrant image. This file may reside in different areas; ours was in /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/. Change the IPv4 local connections entry from...

   host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            trust
   

   to

   host    all             all             0.0.0.0/0               trust
   

3. Restart PostgreSQL on the vagrant image: sudo service postgresql restart
4. Configure your database tool to connect to localhost, port 15432.

You should be able to connect to your Vagrant PostgreSQL databases now.

Nice Mercurial tutorial by Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software) wrote a very entertaining and thorough tutorial on Mercurial, a distributed version control system (DVCS). The tutorial has a Subversion re-education pre-tutorial for those of us with Subversion brain damage. Well worth a look. Sadly, Joel will no longer be blogging, citing the need to focus on his growing software company. His musings on software development will be missed.

Mockito's @InjectMocks annotation does reflection-based DI

I've been using @InjectMocks heavily lately since it came out in version 1.8.3 of mockito. The javadocs for this annotation state that it uses setter injection to inject its dependencies. Being a lazy developer, I was writing a unit test yesterday at work and forgot to write the setter methods for a couple of dependencies on the SUT that I was testing. Lo and behold, the test passed and all mock verifications were satisfied. Very confused, I went back to some other unit tests and their SUTs and removed the setter methods. In all of my cases, the tests continued to pass. A quick note to the mockito list confirms what I discovered--@InjectMocks actually is using a reflection-based DI scheme, not unlike what Spring does when you annotate collaborator fields in a Spring bean with @Autowired and @Resource. Very cool feature, as this further reduces code noise. Here is the discussion on Google Groups.

Are you cultivating your software development expert mind?

What are you doing to build your proficiency in software development? It's something I've been interested in lately. How do you develop an expert mind in software development? I spend my day consulting and I notice that most of the people that I develop software solutions with day-to-day do not spend any time outside of work cultivating their development skills. I'm somewhat dumbfounded by this phenomenon. Is this commonplace elsewhere?

I spend a fair amount of time reading books and then applying the reading to personal coding projects. Typically I have used these projects to learn a new technology. Recently I've started working through Dave Thomas's Code Katas. From Dave's Code Kata website:

Code Kata is an attempt to bring this element of practice to software development. A kata is an exercise in karate where you repeat a form many, many times, making little improvements in each. The intent behind code kata is similar. Each is a short exercise (perhaps 30 minutes to an hour long). Some involve programming, and can be coded in many different ways. Some are open ended, and involve thinking about the issues behind programming. These are unlikely to have a single correct answer.

So, again, what are you doing to practice software development?

Getting a handle on code quality with Sonar

I've been working with a client recently who uses Sonar, an open source code quality management platform hosted at Codehaus. I'm thoroughly impressed with this tool. If you want to see what the tool can do without investing the time in installing it, take a look at the various screencasts. They also have a live version of Sonar up so you can play with it without installation.

We've been working on getting unit tests built around a legacy code base and Sonar has been a big help in identifying classes that are the biggest code coverage offenders. We used the Clouds feature, a word cloud that weights the class names in the cloud based on code coverage and complexity. The less test coverage on the class and/or the more complex the class, the larger the weight of that class name word in the word cloud. It really helped us focus on where to direct our testing efforts.

I have yet to get this tool up and running in one of my own projects, but things are finally starting to simmer down now with consulting and training activities that I hope to focus on building out a CI environment using Hudson and hooking in Sonar to that environment. Stay tuned.

Promoting keystroke use in Eclipse

If you want to promote key mappings use in Eclipse, MouseFeed might be your ticket. This Eclipse plugin monitors your mouse usage, and when you click on a UI component (button, menu, etc.) that can be invoked by key stroke, the MouseFeed plugin will pop up a small notification window stating that the action has a key mapping. The notification window disappears after a few seconds, but it's power is obvious. Very similar to the Key Promoter plugin in IntelliJ IDEA. Very cool Eclipse plugin.

Here is a screencast of the MouseFeed plugin in action:

Using the new Groovy-Eclipse V2 plugin

Started using the new Groovy-Eclipse V2 plugin. I'm continuing to fine tune some Groovy training that I've come up with in collaboration with DevJam. So far so good. Seems to work pretty well. I'm not expecting much at the moment, but the alpha seems pretty stable. We need an open source Groovy IDE for the training, and I would love to use Eclipse and this plugin to fulfill that role. I think I still prefer IntelliJ for Groovy stuff (it seems more mature), but it costs some money and most people are using Eclipse these days.

ColorSchemeDesigner.com

If you're developing a website and need to pick out a color scheme, take a look at ColorSchemeDesigner.com. Great webapp for picking color scheme. Liked it so much I donated some money to the developer. Highly recommended.

Is Spring Framework becoming a configuration nightmare?

I had a crappy day dealing with Spring Framework 3.0 M4. I've been using Spring since 2004 and I've been a big fan of its use. Lately however, I've become concerned that Spring Framework is turning into another EJB, a configuration monster. I've been using Spring 3.0 M1 for a while now and recently upgraded to M4 to get access to some new Spring MVC annotations, @RequestBody and @ResponseBody. These annotations allow you to bind directly to the request body and response body, respectively. They're very helpful if you are using Spring MVC for ReSTful web services. They seemed relatively innocuous, but after some time with them, they are much more complicated to configure than one might expect from Spring. Still don't have a working solution with these new annotations. Part of it is the documentation isn't where it needs to be, but that will hopefully be remedied by the time 3.0 is GA. In the meantime, I'm stuck on the damn configuration of view resolvers, mapping adapters, and what not. Configuration kills! I've had the chance to work on Grails and I must say, I am very much longing for another opportunity to work on that platform. I realize that Grails uses Spring, but Grails also keeps Spring away from, behind the covers for the most part, so I can build solutions for my client instead of muddling through configuration acrobatics.

Tomcat Expert Series here in Minneapolis

Attended the SpringSource Tomcat Expert Series seminar here in Minneapolis this morning at the Hyatt Regency. Filip Hanik of SpringSource presented. Filip is a major committer to the Apache Tomcat project. Excellent technical presentations on Tomcat and JVM performance tuning tips and debugging JVM memory and thread issues. Lots of good information around Sun's generational heap and garbage collecting the heap, If you get a chance to take this presentation in, you won't regret it. $75 USD for 3.5 hours and a nice lunch. Seemed like a nice turn out, probably 120 or so attendees. SpringSource seems to be picking up momentum in the JVM space with recent acquisitions of G2One (Groovy and Grails consulting and development) and Hyperic (web application monitoring and management tooling). Could be well positioned when the economy comes out of this funk it's currently in.

Using ArgumentMatcher to capture indirect output arguments

Yesterday, I posted a blog entry about performing assertions directly in your ArgumentMatcher implementations.  I wanted to close the loop on my previous usage of the ArgumentMatcher.  After some discussion with the main committer to mockito, Szczepan Faber, it seems that ArgumentMatcher should only be used to capture the indirect output argument, making it accessible to the test code. Once the test code has the indirect output argument available to it, you can then assert on it to your heart's delight. Szczepan recommended not embedding the assertions directly in the ArgumentMatcher implementation.  More information can be found here.  Seems like a good approach. 

Ubuntu Linux "Dapper Drake" rocks!

Well, it's been about a week that I have been working with Ubuntu Linux "Dapper Drake" on one of my desktops here at home. I'm thoroughly impressed. I've used RedHat and Fedora Core distros before and have been satisfied with them. Never super impressed, but satisfied. SuSE seemed slow to me so I really didn't invest much time in it. Tried Dapper Drake on a laptop that had a hosed Windows XP installation on it. Dapper Drake worked well on it, and after I bought a Netgear wireless adapter for it that Dapper Drake instantly recognized, I was off to the races with Dapper Drake.

After messing around with the Drake on this smallish laptop, I decided to install it on development desktop that currently held Windows XP Professional. It was my thought to dual boot this system, but for some reason, the Windows XP Professional installation would die during the boot process. OK, I thought, I wasn't really using Windows here much anyways, and I still have my Dell XPS system for a Windows installation. So I reformatted the Windows partition to a Linux partition and mounted it to the filesystem.

I've gone to installing Kubuntu on both of my Dapper Drake installations. I think I resonate with KDE more than GNOME. I really like the kdesvn integration into Konquerer. Much like TortoiseSVN in Windows. Ripping some albums to Ogg format and amaroK is very cool. I have my Java development tools installed (IntelliJ IDEA, DbVisualizer, Eclipse 3.2+Callisto). I've been using Java 6 Beta 2 on this box and it's working like a dream.

Definitely recommend Dapper Drake to those out there that want a no-nonsense Linux installation that's super simple to upgrade and install packages on.