"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Leonardo DaVinci
Software development for the modern web continues to evolve at a furious pace. In recent years we’ve seen the trend of client-side state move to the server only to correct itself back again. Despite JavaScript’s obvious utility, two engineers are likely to yield three opinions regarding its worthiness. HTML5 ushers an armada of rich-media and concurrency support right into the browser. The proven, forty-year-old relational data model has fallen out of vogue to defiant NoSQL systems, and our version-control stores have undergone both implementation and paradigm overhauls.
Our tools constitute an everchanging buffet of prescriptions, and sorting through the array of options presents a dizzying exercise.
In the meantime, engineers face the same central challenges raised by building any multi-user program; we like our code elegant and maintainable. We need it to run efficiently and securely. We must assert its correctness.
In the Java space, many answers have come from a set of specifications released under the heading of the Java Enterprise Edition. The overarching goal of this effort remains: hide away the syntactic complexity inherent in software development, and attempt to provide a clean standard model upon which to build. In other words, the Java EE Platform composes an evolving toolkit, and a fallible one at that.
So a few years back we set out to fill some of the holes left unspecified by Java EE, and ended up holding the reins to a test framework which inspired our imaginations and proved more versatile than initially envisioned. In fleshing out ideas to best share the lessons we’d learned, it became clear that we didn’t need to document any particular technology. Developers have been missing a cohesive map to navigate the murky waters of Java EE, its adjacent frameworks, and its services.
This text does not detail a singular specification. Those volumes may be found elsewhere, because we’ve found it makes little sense to begin our learning with the Solutions.
Instead, let’s align our start with the Problems. We’ll take a use-case centric approach to the testable development of enterprise Java, and after a bit of exploratory theory and requisite background each chapter will tackle a single high-level issue. The solutions we propose may span from the user interface to persistent storage, touching upon a number of standards or third-party projects along the way. All examples are executable, and as proof run in production on the companion website.
The newbie should expect to meet the players in an enterprise Java system, and bring a blank repository from scratch to a fully-deployed, live public application on the cloud. Coders of all stripes may find appealing approaches to testing against seed data, pushing events to the client, interacting with a distributed data grid, validating the user interface, and more.
Quite simply, we’ll aim to make the complicated much less so. With luck, this will empower greater productivity and enjoyment in your work.
At least, that’s been our experience while employing the techniques which inspired this book.
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
- Italic
-
Indicates new terms.
- Constant width
-
Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.
Constant width bold-
Shows commands or other text that is of special interest or relevance inside a wider sample.
|
Tip
|
This element signifies a tip or suggestion. |
|
Note
|
This element signifies a general note. |
|
Warning
|
This element indicates a warning or caution. |
Supplemental material (code examples, exercises, etc.) is available for download at https://continuousdev.org. We offer a guide to get started in the Requirements and the Example Application chapter.
This book is here to help you get your job done. All contents here are licensed under 'Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic', and we invite the community at large to contribute work including feature requests, typographical error corrections, and enhancements via our GitHub Issue Tracker. You may reuse any of the text or examples in compliance with the license, which requires attribution. See full license for details.
|
Note
|
Safari Books Online is an on-demand digital library that delivers expert content in both book and video form from the world’s leading authors in technology and business. |
Technology professionals, software developers, web designers, and business and creative professionals use Safari Books Online as their primary resource for research, problem solving, learning, and certification training.
Safari Books Online offers a range of product mixes and pricing programs for organizations, government agencies, and individuals. Subscribers have access to thousands of books, training videos, and prepublication manuscripts in one fully searchable database from publishers like O’Reilly Media, Prentice Hall Professional, Addison-Wesley Professional, Microsoft Press, Sams, Que, Peachpit Press, Focal Press, Cisco Press, John Wiley & Sons, Syngress, Morgan Kaufmann, IBM Redbooks, Packt, Adobe Press, FT Press, Apress, Manning, New Riders, McGraw-Hill, Jones & Bartlett, Course Technology, and dozens more. For more information about Safari Books Online, please visit us online.
Please address comments and questions concerning this book to the publisher:
We have a web page for this book, where we list errata, examples, and any additional information. You can access this page at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/<catalog page>.
To comment or ask technical questions about this book, send email to [email protected].
For more information about our books, courses, conferences, and news, see our website at http://www.oreilly.com.
Find us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/oreilly
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/oreillymedia
Watch us on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/oreillymedia