Skip to main content

ACCU Conference 2009 Proposal (1)

By
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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more

RESTful Behaviour Guide

By
I’ve used a lot of existing Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and have created several of my own. I see a lot of inconsistency, not just between REST APIs but often within a single REST API. I think most developers understand, at a high level, what a REST API is for and how it should work, but lack a detailed understanding. I think the first thing they forget to consider is that REST APIs allow you to identify and manipulate resources on the web. Here I want to look briefly at what a REST API is and offer some advice on how to structure one, how it should behave and what should be considered when building it. I know this isn’t emacs vs vi, but it can be quite contentious. So, as  Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean said, this “...is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” Resources & Identifiers In their book, Rest in Practice - Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (‎ISBN: 978-0596805821), Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson describe resour...
1 comment
Read more