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ACCU Conference 2009 Proposal (1)

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Title: Extending Liquid Office: A Quick Guide to Java Mocking, JavaScript, AXIS, SOAP and Testing

Type: Case study

Duration: 90 min

Speaker: Paul Grenyer

Speaker biography: Paul has been programming in one form or another
for over 20 years. After several years using C++ and a brief period
using C#, Paul has now ended up somewhere he hoped he'd never be,
programming in Java, and finding he really quite likes it. After time
in industries such as marking machinery, direct mail, mobile phones,
investment banking and Internet TV, Paul is currently working for an
exciting new insurance industry based startup in Norwich. He has been
an ACCU member since 2001, a regular publications contributor
(including the new Desert Island Books column), creator of the
mentored developers and a committee member for most of that time. When
he's not programming or getting used to married life and being a step
parent, Paul thoroughly enjoys science fiction, heavy metal and
cycling.


Liquid Office is a work flow management system written predominantly
in Java, JSP and JavaScript by Cardiff who are now owned by Autonomy.
This presentation will give a brief introduction to Liquid Office, but
then turn to the details of how it can be extended using Java based
technologies which are easily transferred into other applications and
go far beyond the scope of Liquid Office.

Liquid Office processes can be scripted using BeanShell and custom
JARs. It also provides a rich library for talking to the work flow and
performing actions such as reading and writing process fields. In
order to until test custom JARs for liquid office a thin wrappers need
to be written around a few key objects in the library to allow
mocking out. I will look at some methods of doing this.

Almost all BeanShell scripting occurs on the server side. Client side
scripting must be written in JavaScript. This can be quite restrictive
and introduces some interesting versioning issues. I will look at
methods of getting round this, including how to generate JavaScript
soap clients.

Liquid Office runs on a TomCat server and uses AXIS to run web
services. The server configuration also allows custom web services to
be hosted. I will look at how to configure AXIS for custom web
services and various methods of automating the testing of custom web
services.

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