OCZ Vertex Plus SSD vs. MacBook

After the HD in my old (2006) white MacBook started making funny noises I decided – despite its age, as it is still working fine otherwise – to upgrade it to an SSD. The OCZ Vertex Plus 240GB seemed like a good choice at a reasonable price.

However, while both a Time Machine restore and a new OS X Snow Leopard installation ran fine, the disk was not in a bootable state afterwards. This is where I had to learn that these days you need to apply updates to hardware before being able to use it… Bumping the firmware from 3.02 to 3.55 using the firmware updater found at http://www.ocztechnology.com/ssd_tools/OCZ_Vertex_Plus/ did the trick.

Using Disk Utility, burn the Firmware Updater ISO to a CD/DVD, reboot, hold Option until the boot device selection comes up and apply the firmware update. Reboot, and the disk should be working fine.

Scripting using JSR 223 in an OSGi environment

When providing scripting in a Java application, scripting engines conforming to JSR 223 (e.g. Groovy, JRuby, Scala, …) can easily be embedded using something along the lines of

ScriptEngineManager scriptEngineManager = new ScriptEngineManager();
ScriptEngine scriptEngine = scriptEngineManager.getByName("groovy");

However, in an OSGi-based application, the ScriptEngineManager fails to discover scripting engines located in installed bundles bundles, due to the way () it discovers engines available on the class path.

git HTTP push fails with error “RPC failed”

Today, I had the problem that git failed to push a large change set to a HTTP remote with the errors HTTP error code 403: remote hung up unexpectedly and RPC failed; result=22. After some googling around I figured that I had to increase a buffer setting:

git config http.postBuffer 524288000

Maybe this helps someone else having the same problem.

Maven: Check for dependecy and plugin updates

Ever wanted to check if there are updates for any of your Maven project dependencies or plugins? It’s as easy as doing

mvn versions:display-dependency-updates versions:display-plugin-updates

From Maven Versions Plugin.

Eclipse Jubula Automated Test Ant File

As a followup to my previous post on automating Eclipse Jubula tests with Jenkins, here’s an Ant file that

• Extracts the target platform (Eclipse in this case) and Jubula’s instrumentation plugin
• Deploys the plugins under test into the target platform (simple copy in this case, no p2 installation)
• Runs the Jubula tests usingtestexec
• Collects links to all test results in an index.html file that can be published using the Jenkins HTML Publisher plugin

Automating Eclipse Jubula Tests with Jenkins

Eclipse Jubula is a pretty new addition to the Eclipse universe. It’s a functional UI testing tool that allows you to specify and run tests. The tests are not code-based but can be assembled from available building blocks or recorded in the UI.

While evaluating tools for doing functional tests for an Eclipse Plugin, I wanted to check out how easy it would be to integrate it into our Continuous Integration builds with Jenkins (the CI server formerly known as Hudson). It turned out there were a few pitfalls, but in the end it was pretty straightforward – hopefully this article will save you some time.

To get started, download and install Jubula from the download page. After installation (simply run setup.sh, and install it for example into /home/jenkins/jubula), you’ll have to prepare your target RCP or Eclipse Runtime by extracting rcp-support.zip from the Jubula installation to the RCP Application/Eclipse directory. This contains a plugin that needs to be available in the AUT (Application Under Test) for Jubula to be able to run the tests.

Pitfall: The provided Jubula installation package for Linux includes a 32-bit JRE and SWT in a 32-bit version that is used to run Jubula and its tools. The CI server being a 64-bit machine I had to install quite a few 32-bit shared libraries to get Jubula to run. To find out what libraries are missing, starting Jubula locally on the CI server with the -debug -console -consoleLog options helped. On the CI build server you might get away without this step if all you run locally is the autagent (see below).

Masquerade Service Simulator 0.9.1

Masquerade Service Simulator 0.9.1 has been released. It comes with some bug fixes and a few new features:

• Fixed class loading issues in standalone mode
• Added XPathAlternativesRequestIdProvider
• Added Tibco EMS connection factory provider
• Provide (default) option to not persist request history
• Show more request history entries in table
• Added replace option to import/export dialog
• Request History: Added timing informations
• Added environment replacement properties to settings
• Configurable amount of JMS consumers
• API supports request timestamp retrieval

Get it from http://code.google.com/p/masqueradesim/downloads/list

Configuring Maven Mirrors

Configuring a Maven mirror might be a good idea for example when

• You live in Europe and the UK mirror is faster for your
• repo1.maven.org is experiencing troubles

It was only yesterday when repo1.maven.org was down that I learned how to configure mirrors for Maven: Simply add the few lines below to your .m2/settings.xml:

<settings>
  ...
  <mirrors>
    <mirror>
      <id>UK</id>
      <name>UK Central</name>
      <url>http://uk.maven.org/maven2</url>
      <mirrorOf>central</mirrorOf>
    </mirror>
  </mirrors>
  ...

Masquerade Service Simulator Released

A first version of Masquerade Service Simulator has been released. Masquerade is a configurable Service Simulator that returns simulated responses for service requests.

Service stubs can easily be implemented using Masquerade. Simply run Masquerade standalone using its embedded Jetty server or deploy it to an application server (e.g. Tomcat) of your choice, and configure your simulations using its web interface.

Service simulation is useful for example when

• Providing a service stub for integration or regression tests
• Doing functional tests against a system that is not (yet) available
• Providing a stub for functionality that is yet to be implemented in an agile project

Vaadin Widgetset Compilation with Maven

Joram has written an interesting post on how to avoid having Maven recompile the Widgetset for a Vaadin project with every build:

http://www.jorambarrez.be/blog/2011/04/28/howto-vaadin-addon-maven/

Our continuous integration turnaround time for Vaadin projects has dropped to a few seconds without the GWT compiler overhead, really helpful!