When using a specification marked up as:

a specification with the following methods is exercised:

The result is a very lightweight specification that contains no state, data, or scripting in it, and by sticking to a single command, I open myself up to driving concordion from a simple wiki syntax without having to worry about how to encode all the various commands.

The eval command itself is fairly simple:

I have some ideas to improve further on this (stealing from Cucumber) to extract any numbers, or strings in quotes as parameters to the evaluated method which should add even more value to these extremely simple specifications, along with a similar "echoeval" command to insert content from the fixture into the rendered specification.

I'm sure a lot of people might cringe at this way of writing tests and specifications, but I'm finding I can very quickly jot down a sentence or two about something I want to test as it occurs to me in the form of a specification (rather than a TODO comment or JIRA task) and immediately have it fire up as a failing test.

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What started as a fairly simple mind map quickly grew into a entwined mess of genre mixing music centering around a melodic, yet frenetic mishmash of technical, progressive, and extreme styles. From artists like Belarus based Thelema, whose progressive/technical death metal fuzes elements of jazz then sliding over to the advant garde jazz entwined mathcore of Berlin based War From A Harlot's Mouth. The discovery of Prog Archives via Twitter led to a financial downfall and music journey of discovery with such delightful findings such as Brazilian based Dialeto, Norways Gazpacho, Puerto Rico's Trili.

Standout "big name" albums of recent adoration include the new Ty Tabor (Kings X) solo album "Balance", Tim "The Ripper" Owen's new solo album "Play My Game", Heaven and Hells (damnit, it's Sabbath ok?) "The Devil You Know".

Out of everything I've been listening to lately, I've not found any duds, however the new Chariot release "Wars and Rumours of Wars" and Leif Edling's solo album "Songs of Torment, Songs of Joy" were definite letdowns.

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• The Music of 2008 - week 44
• The Music of 2008 - week 43
• The Music of 2008 - week 42

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After a short hacking session, followed by a lot of repetitive regex experiments, I've settled on the following script:

The script makes use of Brian Doyle's clj-web-crawler clojure library, and the flying saucer HTML render library.

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I was pleasantly surprised to see some fairly useful (ish) coverage data come back:

You can easily see coverage information for your code, even if you end up trying to decipher clojures generated class names. You even get fairly useful breakdown on the class detail, even if there's only the one method on each class:

Once you've installed the clojure-maven-plugin, simply configure the plugin in your pom.xml:

After defining which namespaces you wish to compile, and which script to use as your starting test script, bind the plugin to both the compile and test phases (it would be nice if the plugin handled this automatically, but I'm not sure its possible) and call "mvn emma:emma" for your very own coverage report.

Adding these simple automated compile, test, and coverage processes to a clojure's impressive arsenal clojure already offers gives me a greater level of trust to experiment and use the young language in projects destined for a production environment.

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My first step was setting up a standard clojure workflow, this led to writing a simple clojure-maven-plugin over on github which lets me compile my clojure code with a simple maven declaration:

Next comes an initial clojure lib which simply implements a known Java interface:

Whilst very simple, this small example gives us a concrete starting point to go forward - OSGi integration:

The ClojureProvidingComponent class is a simple OSGi SCR component (OSGi metadata build via the maven-scr-plugin, when this component is activated it simple gets an instance of our clojure library, and registers it as an OSGi service. That service is then looked up, and executed.

Due to some class loader related issues with clojures' current implementation, we're required to swap out the current threads context classloader whilst we construct our object (once this is resolved, we should be able to have our clojure lib be the component itself.

As our clojure library current does very little, we don't need to mess with the class loader in order to run it, however as we extend the clojure side further, I'm sure we will. As a simple work around, the service we register into OSGi could be a dymanic proxy which handles the class-loader swapping for us transparently.

As classpath entries under under Apache Felix used their own protocol, one part of clojure still needs to be patched in order to work:

All in all, getting clojure to work under OSGi wasn't as hard as I expected, thou I expect to find other issues once I start to add actual functionality to the clojure library side of things.

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• Google XML Pages
• Simple time tracker code published
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Over on the debut stage I found Palmerston North band Ruski (roo-ski) a fun act to watch:

The highlight however was the Family Force 5 gig, great live show - although at times it didn't seem entirely all that live:

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• The Music of 2008 - week 44
• The Music of 2008 - week 43
• The Music of 2008 - week 42

Top rock

• Avantasia - The Scarecrow
• Extreme - Saudades De Rock
• Edguy - Tinnitus Sanctus
• Glenn Hughes - First Underground Nuclear Kitchen
• Guns n' Roses - Chinese Democracy
• King's X - XV
• Mötley Crüe - Saints of Los Angeles
• Secret & Whisper - Great White Whale
• Starbreaker - Loves's Dying Wish
• Tesla - Forever More

Top melodic/power/progressive metal

• Aryeon - 01011001
• Circle II Circle - Delusions of Grandeur
• Cynic - Traced In Air
• Dragon Force - Ultra Beatdown
• Evergrey - Torn
• Falconer - Among Beggars and Thieves
• Iced Earth - The Crucible of Man - Something Wicked, Pt. 2
• Jon Oliva's Pain - Global Warning
• To-Mera - Delusions
• Warrel Dane - Praises To The War Machine

Top death/black metal/progressive death/technical

• Adversary - Singularity
• Arsis - We Are The Nightmare
• Becoming The Archetype - Dichotomy
• Bloodbath - The Fathomless Mastery
• Ihsahn - Angl
• Into Eternity - The Incurable Tragedy
• Keep of Kalessin - Kolossus
• Omnium Gatherum - The Red Shift
• Opeth - Watershed
• Scar Symmetry - Holographic Universe

Top stoner/sludge/doom/avant garde

• Benea Reach - Alleviat
• Bison b.c - Quiet Earth
• Burst - Lazarus Bird
• Soilent Green - Inevitable Collapse In the Presence of Conviction
• Swallow the Sun - Plague of Butterflies
• Gojira - The Way of All Flesh
• Daylight Dies - Lost To The Living
• Intronaut - Prehistoricisms (for some reason, removed from the NZ iTunes store...)
• Alpha Galates - A Stimulus for Reason

Top metal/hardcore/goth/thrash

• Architects - Ruin
• Death Angel - Killing Season
• Die Apokalyptischen Reiter - Licht (also removed)
• The Human Abstract - Midheaven
• Lacrimas Profundere - Songs for the Last View
• Moonspell - Night Eternal
• Protest The Hero - Fortress
• The Showdown - Back Breaker
• Testament - The Formation of Damnation

Top accoustic/mood/mellow

• Anathema - Hindsight
• No-Man - Schoolyard Ghosts
• Steven Wilson - Insurgentes
• Black Mountain - In The Future

Top progressive rock

• Amaseffer - Slaves for Life
• Beardfish - Sleeping In Traffic: Part Two
• Demians - Building An Empire
• Glass Hammer - Culture of Ascent
• Lunatic Soul - Lunatic Soul
• Neal Morse - Lifeline
• The Pineapple Thief - Tightly Unwound (also removed)
• RPWL - The RPWL Experience
• The Tangent - Not As Good As the Book
• 3 - The End Is Begun

Top other

• Family Force 5 - Dance Or Die
• Nine Inch Nails - The Slip
• John Schlitt - The Grafting
• Steve Stevens - Memory Crash
• Jeff Loomis - Zero Order Phase

Top disappointments of the year

• Judas priest - Nostradamus
• Alice Cooper - Along came a spider
• Blessed By A Broken Heart - Blessed By A Broken Heart
• Metallica - Death Magnetic (by virtue of mix alone)

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The first problem isn't really solvable without major new language features (usually described as "DSL support"). The second problem could easily be solved by adding a typesafe literal syntax for methods and fields to Java. This is now a sorely needed feature of the language, it's especially useful in combination with annotations.

...

The metamodel API is a bit like the Java reflection API, except that it is provided by the JPA persistence provider, is aware of the JPA metadata, and uses generics in a clever way. (Also it uses unchecked exceptions.) For example, to obtain an object that represents an entity, we call the MetaModel object:

import javax.jpa.metamodel.Entity;
...
Entity order = metaModel.entity(Order.class);
Entity item = metaModel.entity(Item.class);
Entity item = metaModel.entity(Product.class);
...

— In Relation To...  A typesafe criteria query API for JPA

Last week I was working on some code that was suffering from an over abundance of eagerly loaded collections - both performance and problems with passing instances between transactions were causing no end of headaches. In the end, the solution I came up with was to rework the front end queries to only return ids, and wrap them in light weight, type-safe reference:

...
Reference person = Reference.referenceTo(Person.class, 32);
Reference anotherPerson = Reference.referenceTo(someExistingPerson);
...

As the Reference holds only the id and class, they're very easily to throw around between threads, sessions and transactions, resolving the reference is a simple call to Reference#load(Session) relative to a session or entity manager.

...
Person fullPerson = person.load(sessionFactory.getCurrentSession());
...

Whilst the usage requirements and usage differ vastly between my small solution, they both add much needed functionality to Hibernate.

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• Google XML Pages
• OSGi based Integration testing with TestNG and Apache Felix
• OSGi is Shiny

I've never looked at the JDK sources/build process and I suspect moving the current build to Maven would be an extremely unpleasant and painful process, but once thats done I if such a build tool/process designed for modularity would help, or hinder such an effort moving forward.

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1. Played in 2008: Last played after 1/1/08, sorted by least played.
2. Unplayed in 2008: Last played before 1/1/08, sorted by Artist/Album

"Played in 2008" made my up mornings alarm clock playlist, allowing me re-revisit music I'd not heard in ages even when half asleep, whilst not spoiling my listening plans.

Whilst not being able to listen to ALL my music (navigating to the packed away CDs is somewhat difficult, until I throw out some old furniture), after 48 weeks I've managed to listen to every song in my iTunes library so I thought I'd also share some statistics:

• Total songs in iTunes: 13092 items, 43.6 days, 91.25gb
• Added in 2008: 4715 items, 15.8 days, 38.25gb
• Added in the last 2 months: 1263 items, 4.2 days, 10.58gb
• Played less than 5: 4999 items, 17.6days, 39.80gb
• Played less than 50: 13156, 46.1days, 95.13gb
• Played once: 344 items, 1.1days, 3.03gb
• Played more than 50: 30 items, 2.3 hours, 186.3mb
• Played more than 100: 7 items, 30.2 minutes, 38.2mb
• iTunes purchased: 2713 items, 8.7 days, 22.18gb

I find it interesting that if I'd made the rules "every song in iTunes -at the start of the year-" I probably would have finished much sooner as just over 40% of the library was added this year (mostly from pulling out CDs of artists I didn't have encoded as they came up in the playlist, or from the evil that is iTunes one click purchasing).

So now that I'm over with my A-Z through iTunes I'm over to reviewing all the years new music to collate my thoughts for my top picks of the year.

• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4
• Week 5
• Week 6
• Week 7
• Week 8
• Week 9
• Week 10
• Week 11
• Week 12
• Week 13
• Week 14
• Week 15
• Week 16
• Week 17
• Week 18
• Week 19
• Week 20
• Week 21
• Week 22
• Week 23
• Week 24
• Week 25
• Week 26
• Week 27
• Week 28
• Week 29
• Week 30
• Week 31
• Week 32
• Week 33
• Week 34
• Week 35
• Week 36
• Week 37
• Week 38
• Week 39
• Week 40
• Week 41
• Week 42
• Week 43
• Week 44
• Week 45
• Week 46
• Week 47
• Week 48

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• The Music of 2008 - week 44
• The Music of 2008 - week 43
• The Music of 2008 - week 42

• Becoming The Archetype - Dichtomy
• Jorn - Lonely Are The Brave
• Tomorrow's Eve - Mirror Of Creation
• U2 - Achtung Baby / All That You Can't Leave Behind / Beautiful Day / Electical Storm / How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb / Joshua Tree / October / Pop / Rattle And Hum / The Unforgettable Fire / Vertigo #1 / War / Wide Awake In America / Window In The Skies / Zooropa
• Underoath - Define The Great Line
• Unexpect - In A Flesh Aquarium
• Van Halen - Balance / For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge
• VAST - Music For People / Nude
• Velvet Revolver - Contraband
• Vintersorg - The Focusing Blur / Solens Rötter / Visions From The Spiral Generator
• Virgin Black - Elegant And Dying / Requiem - Mezzo Forte
• Vision Divine - Stream Of Consciousness / The 25th Hour
• Voivod - Katorz
• Warbringer - One By One The Wicket Fall / War Without End
• Wastefall - Self Exile
• What's He Building In There? - What's He Building In There?
• Xystus - Surreal
• Zero Hour - A Fragile Mild
• Zonata - Exceptions
• The 77's - A Golden Field Of Radioactive Crows

— Still unplayed in 2008: 0 items, 0 days, 0gb

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• The Music of 2008 - week 44
• The Music of 2008 - week 43
• The Music of 2008 - week 42

— Still unplayed in 2008: 427 items, 1.3 days, 3.20gb

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• The Music of 2008 - week 44
• The Music of 2008 - week 43
• The Music of 2008 - week 42

— Still unplayed in 2008: 932 items, 2.9 days, 6.28gb

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• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

The closest book to be was the new Peter F. Hamilton novel "The Temporal Void", I think this meme is the cloest I'll get to actually READING this book for a long time:

"But they're not letting anyone out of the city, let alone offplanet."

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• Strangers
• The Innocent

— Still unplayed in 2008: 1340 items, 4.2 days, 8.88gb

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If we can't have closures in Java 7, can we at least have comprehensions added to the collections API? It seems I'm forever writing, or pulling in Commons Collections (which lacks generics) or Functional Java to add simple functional list comprehension support to my projects, if the core Java collections API included something as simple as:

public static interface Collector {
  boolean collect(T t);
}

public static  List collect(List list, Collector map) {
  List mappedList = new ArrayList();
  for (T t : list) {
    if (map.collect(t)) {
      mappedList.add(t);
    }
  }
  return mappedList;
}

and several others, then we'd be able to introduce a new standard programming model to Java developers, and practically show them how and why adding closures would benefit them.

Of course, we just just promote the hell out of Functional Java and be done with it :)

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— Still unplayed in 2008: 1775 items, 5.7 days, 11.95gb

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• The Music of 2008 - week 45
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• The Music of 2008 - week 42

— Still unplayed in 2008: 1985 items, 6.3 days, 13.17gb

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Now it's as easy as a few lines of XML and SQL to have your database automatically regenerated whenever you run your tests:

<build>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>com.theoryinpractise.dbng</groupId>
      <artifactId>dbng-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>1.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
      <configuration>
        <createDatabase>true</createDatabase>
        <username>postgres</username>
        <password>****</password>

        <files>
          <file>src/main/resources/test.sql</file>
        </files>

      </configuration>
  			  	
      <dependency>
        <groupId>postgresql</groupId>
        <artifactId>postgresql</artifactId>
        <version>8.3-603.jdbc4</version>
      </dependency>

    </plugin>
  		  
  </plugins>
</build>

By default the plugin is (currently) bound to the 'process-classes' phase as I wanted things to run before the 'test' phase and Maven doesn't currently have before/after meta-phases. Migrations themselves are not yet fully supported in the plugin yet, but for most cases I'm finding simply recreating the database and applying a set of SQL files (schema, default data) does 99% of what I need in testing.

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— Still unplayed in 2008: 2086 items, 6.7 days, 13.69gb

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• The Music of 2008 - week 45
• The Music of 2008 - week 44
• The Music of 2008 - week 43

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Metaltowerology

Head On Universe Collision

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I think I have about 40 minutes of the 90 minute set on video, so once I've gone through it all and edited it up I'll post the full thing somewhere.

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