New job

I've just completed the first week on my new assignment: consulting team member on a medium sized project for Eniro. It's been a great experience so far, and although I can't reveal the exact nature of the project, I can say that it's based on high profile open source Java EE components such as Spring, Hibernate, MySQL, Linux, Velocity and Maven.

I've worked quite a bit with most of the stuff before, but one thing that's new to me is Maven multi-module project hierarchies which works quite well, and makes Maven look even better. Another nice thing that I've never used before is Maven Proxy.

One thing we decided on early on was to use contiuous integration, and since we're heavy users of Maven already, Continuum seemed like a sane choice for server. Unfortunately we've having problems getting it to work with SSL+authentication...

The project is based on an older application which has been split into three major parts, with each part having two or three sub-parts. The older application did have a partial test suite, but it hadn't really been kept up to date the latter half, so the first step will be to resurrect and/or rewrite the testsuite. This situation is fairly common in my experience, where you start out writing tests for everything, but as the project progresses, people pay less and less attention to testing, and the suite drifts further away from the code base. Hopefully CI will counter this behaviour :-)

My methodology for writing DAO testing against a database was accepted with some enthusiasm. I've written a little about it in "Rolling with Spring and Hibernate", but I'm planning a larger entry on that subject. An update on that article is planned, too. Stay tuned!