This week at work I learned about ICEfaces, as well as my managers dislike of it. I’m not sure what it is that I dislike about writing code that in turn writes code, but that is definitely the case with ICEfaces. There’s just something that feels inefficient about some program interpreting my code and then generating more code from that. I know that is what a compiler does, but that’s the whole purpose of compilers. That is not the case for many code producing mechanisms.
Regardless of how I feel about such a thing, it was nice to get some more insight in to what is actually being used in the corporate world. Most of my web development experience has been in PHP and with apache. In fact, I didn’t even realize that many people even used Java for web development. I just assumed that most web development was done in either PHP or .NET.
I now understand why writing functional tests or unit test for code is so important. I have taken a course that included some test-driven development and assignments that required unit tests. Intellectually I have understood the value of these tests, but I never really saw the full benefits of writing tests (although I’m sure I still don’t fully understand).
This week at work one of my big tasks was to write tests for a library that had been written previously and is now being used in a system my team is developing. In writing these tests, I have been able to learn several things about the library:
- How the code works, and what it is supposed to do
- The database that the code was written for is not the same one we are using
- The library was missing several key functions
If I hadn’t written test for this library, I would still have been in the dark about how it was doing what it was doing (even though I had written a web service that called all the library functions). I definitely wouldn’t have realized that it was missing features, and I definitely wouldn’t have known why it wouldn’t have worked with our current database. So, I saved myself and my team plenty of head scratching by writing tests. Who would have thought test would save time?
I’m lucky that I even have time to post this, because I’m swimming in a sea of work where the bottom is several feet out of reach.
From work deadlines to school deadlines and even further to job hunting, I just plain have a lot of stuff I have to get done in a short amount of time. I’m not gonna lie, I’m kinda freakin’ out.