"Run Focused Test Method" and "Debug Focused Test Method" for NetBeans Groovy Support in main and main-silver Hg Repositories

The ability to run or debug a single Groovy test from the IDE has now been merged into the main and main-silver Hg repositories for the NetBeans IDE. I assume this will work into main-golden and thus the nightly dev builds soon. I will post another update once that happens.

Adding "Run Focused Test Method" and "Debug Focused Test Method" to NetBeans Groovy Support

If you are a NetBeans and Groovy fan, then you have probably noticed over the years you can not execute nor debug an individual test method if using Groovy for testing. I have contributed to other parts of the IDE at various times, but hadn't looked into the Groovy support until recently. I finally had enough executing all tests in a file.

The code isn't necessarily difficult. For what I am adding it is slightly complicated due to NetBeans Groovy support module dependencies, and some things needing to be broken out a little differently. For now I am using reflection to access what I need, and that will work fine enough in the near term. Long term I plan to work with other community contributors to clean things up.

Another thing which makes coding this interesting is a mismatch between NetBeans notion of an offset into a source file and the Groovy ASTs notion of it. NetBeans uses a cursor or single integer value offset, and Groovy uses the notion of a line and column. So, some translation and AST traversal is needed to pinpoint the selected method. Standard editor things, but of note for this fix.

Too, the previous code halfway attempted to do this, but it seems some copy and paste happened between the Java and Groovy support as that code was using Java specific features which will not exactly work as Java is a subset of Groovy. The Groovy AST classes along with a little translation fixed it right up.

The changes should make their way into the code base soon. I have things working locally. I am now cleaning things up. I figure I will tackle other items which bother me about NetBeans Groovy support now that I am getting into it.

I will update once merged in, so check back.

lwp-request or GET and POST and self signed SSL certificates (HTTPS)

I was using the command line last night when I needed to hit one of my pages real quick. I didn't need the output all browser fancy, and I just needed a blurb of text, so I typed GET and the page address plus my credentials. I received an error from down in the bowels of Perl and the LWP::UserAgent library about my certificate not being verified.

I looked around the Internet, and I saw different posts, but nothing told me exactly what to do. Different peoples solutions were vastly different. So, I looked for the documentation for the LWP libraries, and I found them. There I found the exact solution. The library can be affected by environment variables. The specific one is PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME. It is a boolean value or 0/1 in Perl. So on the command line I simply ran:

export PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0

I then reran GET, and everything was good. So, if you run into this problem, then here is your fix. Simple and sweet.

Java, @Override, and refactoring

We have been making some changes to the user interface of a project of which I'm a member. This requires me to change some automated user testing APIs and interfaces to match the new reality.

I don’t remember exactly who I was talking one day when they mentioned my use of the @Override annotation even when implementing interfaces. I told them the IDE added that, and I just left it at that. I couldn’t think of a great use case for that being there at the time, but since the IDE did it for me I figured there must be some point even in the case of interface implementation, so I left it in the code as it didn’t cause any issue and was correct logic.

Now that I have begun to refactor and remove some methods which no longer make sense, I am finding the @Override annotations very useful because the IDE points out what is implemented as an @Override when it isn’t actually overriding anything from a super class or interface. This is a compile time error, and were I not using a fancier IDE, I would still be alerted to the problem when the project was compiled. Thus, the annotation has been a nice aid in this type of refactoring.

This would also be the case of an actual method override in the case where the super method was not called from the override. In such a case, and without @Override, the logic would simply no longer be used, but would compile just fine. The call would be removed from calling code of the super class or interface for the obvious compiler reasons one would encounter, but if someone left that logic in the existing class by mistake, and someone thought it should be called because some other state depended on it without that class being rethought at the time of some major refactoring, then a serious issue has been introduced which could be hard to figure out.

I wanted to share this with everyone as I believe it can help everyone if @Override is always used. If you have a different opinion or thoughts on the topic please share.