We use smtpop.dll in one application to retrieve email from a POP3 mailbox. Today we had to connect to a mailbox over SSL, which smtpop.dll does not support. Our code to retrieve email is abstracted behind a façade class, so I expected to simply substitute a new library for smtpop.dll and to call new methods. …
Monthly Archives: May 2014
Java Server Faces rage!
From http://thoughtworks.fileburst.com/assets/technology-radar-jan-2014-en.pdf: We continue to see teams run into trouble using JSF– JavaServer Faces — and are recommending you avoid this technology. Teams seem to choose JSF because it is a J2EE standard without really evaluating whether the programming model suits them. We think JSF is flawed because it tries to abstract away HTML, CSS …
Learning from a failed deployment
This morning a deployment failed catastrophically. One of the scripts for upgrading the database caused several objects to be dropped unexpectedly. We restored the database from backup, corrected the script, and repeated the deployment, which was successful. We now had to do a retrospective to learn what went wrong and how to avoid it in …
Model-Based Testing
Robert Binder’s Testing Object-Oriented Systems book sits permanenly on my desk. At over 1500 pages long, it is almost a never-ending read, but from time to time I pause to read a few choice chapters. Binder also wrote about the compliance testing of Microsoft’s court-ordered publication of its Windows client-server protocols in 2012. An interesting …