Evermore, one of my WordPress plugins, has been around for a year or so. It’s worked very well, but occasionally I did receive reports of mysterious failures. In an effort to fix it once and for all, I decided to take a new approach. So for the last couple of updates I have used a test-driven development (TDD) approach to iron out all remaining wrinkles. The results were interesting. Continue reading “Test-driven development of WordPress plugins” →
Posts Tagged: testing
Multiple Internet Explorer versions in Windows
You can install several different versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer concurrently on Windows. Finally I could see how awful my site looked in IE5 — and the truth wasn’t pretty.
You can download standalone versions of Internet Explorer 3, 4, 5, 5.5 and 6 from the browser archive at evolt.org. Continue reading “Multiple Internet Explorer versions in Windows” →
Profiling a Java program easily
Profiling is an excellent way to find resource bottlenecks in a program. Java has built-in profiling tools that you can use to easily view a profile of a program’s runtime execution.
To generate a profiling report for a Java program, add the hprof profiler to the program’s command line as follows. Continue reading “Profiling a Java program easily” →
Java stack trace with line numbers
Often in Java program stack trace, you will see some stack frames include a source line number, while some only say “compiled code”. This is because the stack frames without line numbers have been compiled by the JIT compiler, and the JIT compiler obliterates line number information when it compiles code. Continue reading “Java stack trace with line numbers” →
Spy on a Java program
While a Java program is running in a console window, you can can get a stack dump of the program at any time, while it is running. This is very useful for debugging, especially for heavily multithreaded programs. Continue reading “Spy on a Java program” →
Oracle testing with the DUAL table
This feature is a hack intended for testing, but it’s built in to every Oracle installation.
DUAL is a table automatically created by Oracle and accessible to all users. It has one column, DUMMY, containing one row. It’s useful for selecting a constant or expression, because the table always exists (so the query will succeed) and the result will only be returned once (since there’s exactly one row in the table). Continue reading “Oracle testing with the DUAL table” →