While reading Robert C. (Uncle Bob) Martin’s “UML for Java Programmers” [Prentice Hall, 2003] I came accross a reference to “Fitnesse” a wiki-based acceptance testing system. Looks very interesting and well worth a deeper look. I added Uncle Bob’s blog feed to Blogger.com (see my Blogroll) to track other interesting bits and bobs (pun unintended).

These are the articles I read while doing today’s Bloglines trawl that I thought worthy of note. Test driven development in Python by Jason Diamond in OnLamp.com Python Devcenter. Three-tier development with PHP5 by Luis Yordano Cruz in OnLamp.com PHP Devecenter

A long held artical of faith in the Java world is that Java is a Single Language solution. It’s the biggest differentiator between .NET and Java, for example. A summit was held at Sun HQ (reported by Tim Bray) [thanks to dion on TECH for the link] in which it is clear that Sun is interested in other languages that could run on the JVM. The obvious ones are Jython and Groovy, but present was Larry Wall (of Perl fame) and Guido van Rossum (of Python).

Jon Udell has just published an inspirational column in his “Prime Time Hypermedia” series on O’Relly.net. Called Software Movies, Jon shows how you can make much more immediate, high-impact, demos using video capture than is possible with text and images. He demonstrates this with a great example of how he used Windows Media Encoder (WME … a free download from MicroSoft) to capture a video demo of using xpath to make queries on his blog.

This is something that I always forget how to do. Here is the recipe adapted from Linux Server Hacks. < ol> First generate your key $ ssh-keygen -t rsa This created two files, ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. 5. Then copy the key pair to the host you want to login to $ ssh -l userserver “mkdir .ssh; chmod 0700 .ssh”* $ scp .ssh/id_rsa.pub *user@server:.ssh/authorized_keys2 6. Now you can login using $ ssh -l eechrisserver**

Chapter 2 of Jennifer Versperman’s Essential CVS (O’Reilly): CVS Quickstart Guide is online. I used it for quickly setting up my CVS repository on eehope.swan.ac.uk. The best tutorial introduction to CVS is the in Pragmatic Version Control (thoroughly recommend).

I am grateful to Adrian Colyer who has just annnounced the imminent arrival of some flash demos of AspectJ in aAction and also the online availability of presentations (and interviews) made by himself and Rod Johnson at a recent meeting (AOP2004) of the BeJUG (Belgian Java User Group).

I am grateful to the author of the “You are number 6″ blog for pointing out two great sources of information on All Things Java Related. In future I’ll be asking Fred and Eric about a lot of things! Definately a couple of links for my course pages.

Found a couple of useful sites which I’ll use to get LaTeX working with XEmacs. Using XEmacs to edit LaTeX files and Sridhar Lavu – LaTeX on Windows.

Came across this survey of Screen Presentation Tools by Michael Wiedmann whilest looking for ways to do lecture slides/notes in LaTeX. I was directed to that page by blog entry LaTeX beamer on the but she’s a girl… blog by way of a Google Search for LaTeX beamer. This was after finding a reference to the LaTeX beamer package (a similar package to Prosper) in New Beamer from Kai von Fietel’s Geek Notes2.

I liked Together for Java. Before it was bought by Borland, Together was available to academic institutions for free. I used it in my teaching. It had some of the best looking diagrams, could round-trip Java code, and auto-create sequence diagrams. All great stuff when you’re in the business of teaching Modeling and Java to beginning programmers. When Borland bought Together, the free academic licensing deals dissappeared also. Last year I had to rewrite my UML tutorials for Rational Rose (available for free for academic use from IBM) which is far less friendly.

Second article in new IBM developerWorks series alt.lang.jre is an introduction to the Groovy language by Andrew Glover entitled Feeling Groovy. The first article in the series is Get to Know Jython by Barry A. Feigenbaum and is also worth a read. Groovy has a possible advantage over Jython in that it has become the subject of a Java Community Process (JCP) project (JSR 241) and so may become a “standard” for scripting Java objects.