Blogging Pubbitch

Who'd have thought it? Bananas kill warts.

Sometimes, I wonder if I should just devote this blog to something other than "mainly tech" :)

This is the reason why you want a code review of anything that goes into an Open Source project. Leif's comment towards the end seems well balanced and polite.

To whom it may concern,

I note with consternation that there appears to be widespread abuse of java.util.List and java.util.Set, and I believe it best to set the record straight forthwith.

The most important issue to bear in mind when choosing between the two aggrieved parties is whether duplicates are important. If they are, then I humbly concur that "List" is the correct choice. If, however, it is deemed that duplicates are not desirable, then "Set" would be a more apt choice.

Consider also whether the ordering of elements within the collection matters to you, and in particular whether insertion order is maintained. Lists typically maintain their elements in insertion order. Sets tend toward ordering the elements by their natural ordering, though as with the case of that red-headed step-child, the LinkedHashSet, this need not be the case.

Bearing these points in mind, it is with the greatest hope that I await the improvement of java.util.Set and java.util.List's situation.

Your humble servant,

Simon

Here I am in Austria. On my first night, I managed to eat at an Italian restaurant before ending up in an Irish bar. I suspect that I've not quite got the hang of this travel thing. Oh well, at least I overslept this morning!

I've had a couple of reports that my atom feed was broken. It was because of XML parsers doing what the spec says and choking on poorly formed XML (unbalanced tags in this case, where XML states that "a" and "A" are different)

I've now run the thing through the quite wonderful feed validator, so here's hoping that everything continues to work!

This is, quite possibly, the best piece of code I've seen all day: httpd.js. This is going to save me a huge chunk of effort as I work on updating the Firefox driver to be easier to use remotely.

I'm a thousand miles from home and feeling lucky to be here. In the grand scheme of things, there aren't many people who promised themselves they'd always do a job they loved and managed to stick to it. Tonight, I met challenging, smart and articulate people at XtC and also had a chance to hang out, again, with friends I made in Australia. Tomorrow, or more accurately today, I go to work on some fascinating challenges tinged with the possibility of innovative visualization of the information. If it works, it'll be awesome. I'm actually looking forward to waking up early, and mornings? Normally you can forget about them. Politely. Without profanity. This time? Oh yeah! I'll be there.

So, the work-life is going swimmingly, what about the real-life? You work to live, and all that guff. That's shiny too. I'm not sure it's something I'd like to talk about on my blog, open as it is to the world, but life is amazing right now.

Life? It's bloody brilliant.

The first public commit to the WebDriver repository was on 31st December, 2006. Some 280 revisions and 421 days later, it looks like its days are numbered. It's achieved far more than I thought it would; there's support for Firefox, various versions of IE and some basic support for Safari. I've written proof-of-concept bindings of the IE driver in C#, Python and Ruby, and I'm told that people have bindings for the Firefox driver that sink support for it into the Ruby on Rails testing grammar. Better yet, people are presenting about it at conferences and the community behind it is starting to grow.

Why, if it's all going so well, are its days numbered? The answer is that "WebDriver" won't be around for too much longer because it's going to become part of the Selenium 2.0 effort.

The original version of this post posed the questions "why do that?" and "what does it mean?", but you know what? I'm going to answer those in a different post. For now, I think the most important thing to remember is that this is going to make Selenium even better. It's going to be great!

The official announcement was at the recent Selenium User Open Evening. I have to say "thank you" to the Selenium development team for even thinking about this, and to all the people who have had a hand in making WebDriver as complete as it is. More so, I should thank the early adopters for their feedback and comments, both on the project page and the mailing list. Thank you!

I've been traveling a lot recently, which may explain why my inbox is now filled to bursting with emails to reply to. My apologies if you've sent me something and I've not responded. Hopefully normal service will be resumed soon :)

Firefox 3 is coming, and it's about time I started looking at updating the WebDriver extension so that it works with it.

It's pleasing to see that the first page that shows up when you start beta 3 is a "help sheet", containing links to a bunch of useful information. There's also a helpful page on the Mozilla website containing information for XUL and extension developers. Notable for WebDriver is the fact that FUEL appears to be far more advanced than it was, and that there's native support for encoding and decoding JSON strings, which should give a small speed boost. Now, if only there was an embedded HTTP server!

I've yet to see if Firefox 3 is a XULRunner app, but if it is then there's a new avenue for automation that is opened up: JavaXPCOM.

From my initial explorations, this looks like it's going to be relatively painless. I'll keep you posted.