Ruby Screenshot of the Week #28: Unit Testing, and Color Themes

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

NetBeans 6.1 has been out for a while, so we're working full steam ahead on NetBeans 6.5. There are a number of new features in the trunk, and I'll show a couple of them in this post. First of all though - if you have found ERB or RHTML file editing slow in NetBeans 6.1, please try NetBeans 6.5. There was a performance bug where if you have a lot of JavaScript files in your public/javascript folder, RHTML editing gets really slow. A fix for this will be released, but it didn't make it into Patch 1 so it will be addressed in patch 2. But the daily builds of NetBeans 6.5 has the fix, so if this bug is affecting you, please try the dailies instead. And as a side benefit, you'll be able to access the following features:

New Unit Test Runner!

Erno Mononen has written a new Test Runner UI. In 6.1, unit tests were just run and the normal output shown in the Output Window with some hyperlinks. In the new dedicated test runner, you get something similar to the JUnit window we've had for a file for Java. (Click on image for full size)

Be sure to run your test classes as tests (e.g. use Ctrl/Command F6 rather than Shift F6) such that the IDE will run your classes under the testing GUI. This works not just for Test::Unit but for RSpec as well. You can get more details about this in Erno's blog entry, and if you run into issues, please let us know.

The Aloha Color Theme

Mike McKinney has created a really nice dark color theme for NetBeans, called Aloha. I've taken his theme and have integrated it into our "Extra Color Themes" plugin which is available from the Daily Update Center (and soon, the Stable Update Center). To install it, get the plugin, and then go to the Options dialog and choose Aloha under the Fonts & Colors category. You can see more screenshots of Mike's theme in his blog entry. In previous releases we had some problems with CSS and JavaScript colors not being customizeable, but that is not a problem as of NetBeans 6.1 so hopefully all the file types look great. We still need to make the version control diffbar and the debugger breakpoint and current pc lines respect the current theme; hopefully we'll get to that in NetBeans 6.5.

By the way, you may notice that you only see the editor here. When you press Shift-Escape, the current window with focus gets maximized. I do that while editing a lot. You can press Shift-Escape to toggle it back - and you can also temporarily open the other windows (which you can see slide to the edges) by just hovering the mouse over them.

Finally, one minor feature which can come in handy in NetBeans 6.5 is that "Mark Occurrences" now has a keyboard shortcut for navigating between the references. Thus, if you put your caret on some symbol, you've probably noticed that it gets highlighted - along with other occurrences of that symbol in the same file. You can now use Control-Up and Control-Down to jump between these references. Pretty handy.

Oh, and one more thing - JRuby 1.1.2 was released a few days ago and NetBeans now bundled it - along with RSpec 1.1.4.

JavaOne 2008

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

JavaOne 2008 is over. As usual, it was a great event, but with the stress and hard work leading up to the conference, it's a huge relief that it's all over. For my part, it was another extremely busy JavaOne, with two keynote demos, a technical session, a panel discussion, a BOF, as well as three presentations at CommunityOne the day before. If you add to that the prep time for these (keynote software setup and rehearsals, slide planning etc.) there was barely time for anything else, so despite my best intentions I didn't get to meet up with a lot of the out-of-towners visiting JavaOne that I had planned to. I only made it to three technical sessions - and in all three I learned something. Hopefully the rest of the sessions that I missed had the same high level of quality.

I was interviewed by the JavaOne paper on Wednesday; the online interview is here. If you read my blog you might find it interesting. However, in the paper version of the interview, something went horribly wrong... Some of the questions and answers attributed to me were from a previous interview! In particular, I'm found endorsing the Flex SDK, as well as talking about my "math background". Those parts were from the previous day's interview with Chet Haase!
If you're wondering why I'm referred to as a "Rock Star" in the interview, that's a JavaOne thing. The top 20 highest rated talks each year (as determined by the speaker survey forms collected for all talks) earn their speakers a lifetime "Rockstar" title at JavaOne. And speaking of Rockstars, I've got independent verification that I am one (wink, wink) since Ed Burns also interviewed me (and the other JavaPosse guys) for his Secrets of Rock Star Programmers book. The interview was conducted a year ago, but the book is out now. I've read some of the chapters already and really enjoyed it.

It's always exciting to be part of the keynote demos. It's a huge production with over 10,000 people in the keynote hall. A lot of work goes into it. There's a control room in the back, NASA ground-control style. Arun Gupta snapped a few pictures during rehearsals this year and posted them here. The 10th picture gives a sense of the size of the hall. On the left is a drawing one of my kids drew of how she imagined my keynote demo - it would be nice if we actually had chairs to sit on. I guess when you're a kid you wouldn't imagine standing up while doing things on a computer! Anyway, you can see the webcasts from the keynotes - they are all available here. In particular, you can see our Tic Tac Toe demo here (about 2:20 into it), and the JavaScript editing demo here (about 19:45 into it).

The Java Posse BOF was another highlight for me. We had a short appearance at CommunityOne, but with just 20 minutes we didn't quite get into the groove. Thursday night for our BOF however, and with beer, we had a great atmosphere. We had feared a really low turnout since our BOF was scheduled smack in the middle of the Smashmouth concert - but that turned out not to be a problem, either because it was cold outside, or because a lot of people hadn't heard of Smashmouth (think the movie soundtrack from Shrek), or perhaps because we have really loyal listeners! If so, thank you!! A contingent of Norwegian listeners came up and handed us a lot of Norwegian chocolate! I didn't catch your names - but thank you very much! My local gym also thanks you...

My brother (who also works at Sun and has his own blog) has been staying with us for the last month - first for the MySQL conference in April, then JavaOne. It's been great having him here. We tried to get him on the air in one of our podcasts, but he refused - so instead we embarassed him during our BOF with a dedicated slide and tribute! He headed back to Norway this morning; Trond, it's been great to have you here and welcome back.

I'm taking a few days off now to catch up on sleep and chores!