Groovy presentation by Alexandru Popescu

On the date 30 july 2008 at Cluj Napoca for Transylvania JUG, Alexandru Popescu held a presentation about Groovy. He touched the very core about this programming language which has a 100% matching with Java. He presented Groovy in comparisson with Java programming language and he gave a very good starting point for all those who wish to begin programming in Groovy.
Groovy is a pure objectual programming language where all primary types are objects except null.
Groovy is a dynamic programming language which also supprots metaprograming and is a more "groovy" java where the sintax is concerned. Also there are included GStrings which look somehing like this "John has ${something}" where something cand be an object defined somewhere else and it's value is interpreted. Also, the problem we face in java is testing for a null, whereas in Groovy testing for a nul well... is GROOVY: let's say we have an objet Person who has an Address then: person?.address?.street does not go forward if address is null, for example, and it returns a default value which in most cases is null.
Alexandru told us these and much more with examples and all that was needed for a good presentation and he was able to answer in a professional way all our questions which goes to prove that he has a good experience and he is open to sugestions which all in all help improve his work.
I am very glad that I could take place to this presenattion because I came from there with a good knowlage base to get started with Groovy.

How to add subclipse to Eclipse Ganymede

In order to add the SVN subclipse plug-in to Eclipse Ganymede you need to follow the steps below:

1. select Help > Software updates..
2. click "Add site"- enter add http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.4.x
3. check subclipse and SVNKit Adapter BETA
4. click install

How to increase Eclipse heap space

Many times whe encounter the problem of running out of heap space in Eclipse.
The solution to this problem is to edit the eclipse.ini file that can be found in the directory containing eclipse with the following:

-vmargs -Xms512m -Xmx512m -XX:PermSize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m

This configuration of heap space is best suitable for a system with 1024 RAM memory and running just Eclipse and some IM and a music player but when the system memory is needed by many other applications the heap size should be diminished.

Also in order to increase Eclipse performance the permSize should be increased also.

Sources for this article:
http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t61618.html

TestNG Presentation by Alexandru Popescu

Alexandru Popescu one of the people who have the most important implication in the existence of TestNG came on the date 29 july 2008 at Cluj Napoca to hold a presentation to the members of Transylvania JUG.

The presentation was about the use and the features that TestNG bruings. He spoke of the reason he started to work on TestNG, which ofcourse the progarmmers who write tests know very well: many drowbacks and many lacks. He told us about what TestNG can do : group tests, provide parameters to test methods, provide data to tests by means of a DataProvider and also it is possible to define dependences between tests like the example he mentioned concerning a simple database test : connect, insert, findById, delete.
TestNG makes testing more flexibile and more Object oriented. And this is a good ting because now it is very important that a new project is thought from the begining to be able to be tested.
He also said that they collaborated very whel with the people from JUnit and that some features form JUnit 4 are their ideas and also the features they added to unit testing are a product of the JUnit people experience and their and the community of programmers experience.
TestNG also integrates JUnit tests, because if a project wants to pass from JUnit tests to TestNG and they already have hundreds of JUnit tests, these tests most defenetly must not be rewriten!
What I noticed is that Alexandru Popescu is very open to sugestions from programmers and he tryes to accomplish their demands as fast as possible and I consider that this is a very good thing. Also, he was very open to questions, and among those questions there was an interesting one : In what do you write the tests for the code you write for TestNG? and the answer was even better: in TestNG :).

I am very glad that I could take place at this presentation and most definetly whenever I think that some feature in TestNG should be added I will contact him.

TestNG site: http://testng.org/doc/

How to add Mylyn Jira Connector to Eclipse Ganymede

In order to obtain the Mylyn Jira Connector for Eclipse Ganumede you must go to:

Help-> Software updates
Choose the tab : Available software and click on Add Site and introduce the following link:

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/weekly/extras/