I am really excited about this book, because the TOC seems really promising - we decided to focus not only on the JUnit itself, but also on any testing tools and strategies that could help you test you apps thoroughly. This way we intend to cover JUnit, Mocks, Stubs, In-container testing, ... and also including the tests in the build process (continuous integration) - we cover tools like Ant, Maven2, CI tools like Hudson, CruiseControl, ... We will also talk about different techniques on testing different layers from your application - web layer, presentation layer(with tools like Cactus, JSFUnit and HTMLUnit), business logic(with tools like Cactus and mocks), database layer (with DBUnit). Last but not least we want to focus on some completely new aspects on the testing battle-field - testing AJAX, testing Spring and OSGi components.

As I already said I have great expectations about this book - it has all the prerequisites to become a real "Testing Bible". Well, only the readers will show if this can come true.

You can check it here: http://manning.com/tahchiev

The first day was the day after I arrived. It was CommunityONE and I had to be there to talk about JUGs and communities. Me and a couple of other JUG leaders had this talk so that we can help and facilitate people that want to start a new JUG. In my opinion the talk went pretty well - thanks to Van who had taken care of all the details and who pushed us all. Thanks Van :-).

The second and the third day were pretty much hanging with the the java.net guys and with the other JUG leaders. I also visited the pavilion and met some old friends - Vincent Massol, Gael Blondelle and some new friends I was anticipated to meet - Ivelin Ivanov, Vladimir Ralev and Jean Deruelle - all from the Mobicents team.

The one thing that I will remember JavaONE with was the first and only meeting of the Jakarta Cactus team(me, Felipe Leme and Vincent Massol). The Sunday when I arrived, the first thing I did was to check-in the hotel and call Felipe to meet him. And the next day we made an arangement to meet with the Vincent Massol, who started the project exactly 10-years ago. Since then this is the first time we all meet. It was really amazing:

the last five days I have been in Amsterdam to attend the ApacheCON there. The conference this year, as always, was really amazing. The presentations I attended were absolutely on the top-level. I had the chance to meet some of the biggest names in the open-source world and discuss with them on different topics: Chris DiBona, Greg Stein, Bruce Snyder, Erik Hatcher, Paul Holland, Steve Loughran and lots of others. This is a chance I have never had - I and I have attended lots of other conferences. It is absolutely amazing how the members of the ASF are close to each other - it is really like a family. :-)

I attended the conference this year with a whole other bunch of colleagues from HP - we were a gold sponsor of the event, so we had to take care of the booth. So here is the time and place to give a big "Thank you, guys" to Paul Holland and Scott Lamons who made my attendance possible.

Another thing that was really important for me in the conference was my talk about the new release of Cactus. Yes, that is correct - I finally made the release of 1.8.0, and right now I am working with on the 1.8.1 version. I gave a bird-of-feather talk, including all the new stuff that are in the new release. So in case you missed my talk you can get Cactus from here and give it a try. I will be waiting for your feedback.

Yesterday I got the acceptance email for our session on this-year's CommunityOne conference. Me(Bulgarian JUG), Michael Van Riper(Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG), Chris Richardson(East Bay JUG, Oakland), Abdel Remani(Chico JUG, CA), Paul Webber(San Diego JUG), Bruno Souza(SouJava JUG, Brazil), Peter Pilgrim (Java Web User Group, UK), Michael Huttermann (Cologne JUG), Fabrizio Gianneschi(JUG Sardegna), Stephan Janssen(Belgian JUG) and last but not least Thor Henning Hetland (javaBin, Norway) proposed a few months ago a session called "Java User Groups: Think Globally, Act Locally". With this session we would like to focus, not only on the best practices of building a JUG, but also some global resources the JUGs support(the JUG Community mailing list, the JUG googleMap, the Footprint project, ...). Along with giving advices to the newly-born JUGs, we are planning each one of the panelists to cover some issues he has discovered, while leading his local JUG, and also the solution he made to resolve it.

I am really thrilled to take part in this session, and, of course once again meet the guys from JavaPolis on a beer :-).

from quite a long time I have been traveling really a lot. And the fact that I have so much traveling involved in my work, is not all bad. I mean, yes, you live in a hotel, away from your family and your friends, but there's also another side of the coin. For the last few months I was able to visit a lot of the Java User Groups in Europe. I was on a JUG meeting in Düsseldorf with Michael Jastram, I visited the Javapolis in Antwerp, I was in Cologne with Michael Hüttermann, in Luxembourg with Arnaud Cormier, and also managed to make to all the meetings of my Java User Group in Bulgaria. I am also planning to join the Düsseldorf JUG on 31st when they have another gathering, and also in March maybe present a talk to them :-). Also in some of my next meetings I am planning a trip to Amsterdam to meet some of the local JUG leaders there, and also when I return to Bulgaria (hopefully at the beginning of March) I plan a weekend in Athens, so hopefully I will meet Paris Apostalopoulos and Panos Konstantinidis :-). Well, I really enjoy myself visiting new countries and making new friends with the local Java User Group Leaders, and I think that the community we have made is indeed unique. For instance last week I wanted to go to Luxembourg and since I didn't know the city at all, I wrote an email to Arnaud Cormier, asking him to meet with me on a lunch and discuss the JUGs. Well, I was really surprised, when he, not only agreed to have lunch with me, but also took out of his time to show me the city. A great "thank you" to you Arnaud ;-), and indeed the community we have made is really unique.

I have to say that I really had a great time and I am looking forward to the next JavaPolis, but before that, I want to visit the ApacheCON in Amsterdam and the Jazoon in Zurich. So hope to see you all somewhere there.

I had lots of questions about my cell-phone bluetooth remote control when I was on the OpenFest and ApacheCON conferences. Before I explain what I was using to turn my Sony Ericsson GSM into a bluetooth remote control, I want to say that I have done this a lot of time ago and I don't remember much of it.

Actually it is pretty simple, and I haven't invented anything new. First of all you will have to have your Linux kernel with a bluetooth support enabled. Next get the Linux bluetooth daemon installed. Here is the man page of the sdpd. It is also a good idea to have the hcitool installed, too.

The hcitool allows you to scan for bluetooth devices in range. You will need the bluez-utils package, which includes the hidd daemon. After that follow this:

• Start the bluetooth connection of your phone.
• Start the daemons that are needed:
  # sdpd
  # hcid
  
• Use hcitool to scan for your device, and if you are lucky enough, you will get something like this:

  # hcitool scan
  Scanning ...
          00:12:EE:9E:11:23       K700i
  

  
  Remember the BD Address, because we will use it later.
• Now start the actual application that is the mouse and keyboard.

  $ hidd --connect 00:12:EE:9E:11:23
  

  
  Then follow the instructions and once it is started you can use joystick to move the mouse and the 'Yes' & 'No' buttons as a left and right mouse buttons My presentations were in a PDF format, and KPDF accepts right and left mouse clicks as forward and backward slides, so it was pretty easy.

All what is left is to make it automated, by creating a simple script to start the daemons and connect to your phone:

#! /usr/bin/env bash

sdpd
hcid
#This is the K700i phone
hidd --connect 00:12:EE:9E:11:23

I have tested this to work on SonyEricsson K700i, and if anyone knows it is working on some other phone, you can post a comment.

Fortunately I was bringing my camera with me to take a picture. Does anybody know this place? The first one to name the address of the place is the winner :-).

I had a really long trip to Atlanta. Started from Sofia, then spent a couple of days in London. Pretty expensive city, by the way ;-). Then went to New York where I spent a week with my cousin, exploring the New York city and especially Manhattan. Manhattan is the enchanting place to live and to work. Totally amazing mixture of cultures, behaviors, languages and everything else. Really awesome. From there I went straight to Atlanta. This year's conference had lots of keynote speakers and featured the OLPC project. So I had the chance to spent some time working on this interesting machine (pretty shame there was no Java on it... :-( ). Great people, great talks, great conference.(Some of you may know that I had planned a presentation about Cactus). We had also a dinner, provided by Google, also a key-signing party and the lightning talks. Everything was great, but for me the chance to meet some guys that only communicated with me over the email, was priceless. Some words about the hotel - really classy place to stay - my room was on the 62nd floor and I had the chance to explore the city the way only birds can see it :-). After the conference I flew to New York, then back to Paris and then to Düsseldorf, where I will attend on one of their JUG meetings. Then (hopefully), I plan to be back in Sofia by the end of the month ;-)

I am so waiting to go the next ApacheCON in Europe, but first I intend to visit the JavaPolis in Antwerp. Hope to see some of you there, too. :-)

just a brief note on what happened with me yesterday. Me and a colleague of mine were having really great trouble with a Microsoft Word document - after opening the document (which, by the way, was about 500 pages and is confidential, so I cannot post it here), MS Word just hanged. We were trying to read it many times, but every time we tried the MS Word program hanged and eventually crashed. Hopefully we had a VMWare software with a Slackware linux installed, so after we opened the document with OpenOffice, not only it didn't crash, but also we were able to export it as a PDF and an HTML+CSS. Nothing more to say, but: Thank you guys - you rule! :-)

So I would like to present here to you some thoughts on this "specification" and ask if someone heard what is the official Sun's position on this. So the history goes in very brief like this: on first of February OASIS published the 1.1 version of the ODF specifications and recognized it as a worldwide standard. Right now, what is currently happening is that Microsoft are trying to make another standard: Microsoft Open XML (OOXML), or ISO/IEC 29500. On one hand the ODF format was created with the idea of a complete independence of the application that uses it, the Microsoft format has some requirements that only the Microsoft Office applications can provide. Further enough there are some really strong arguments against the Microsoft standard, some of which are: no need of a second standard, OOXML is not even implemented already, the given specification is not complete, more than 10 percent of the examples given cannot be validated as a standard XML, the whole "specification proposal" is more than 6000 pages and misuses terms like "open" and "standard".... (and many others).

In spite of these objections many of the national committees, that have the right to vote for the proposal, voted "for" the proposal.

Now my question is: what is the official opinion of Sun about Microsoft's proposal? Also, if the new proposal is accepted as a specification will it be supported in the OpenOffice, and will we have an OOXML filter?

Some links that might be interesting to you:
http://www.noooxml.org/
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections
http://linux-bg.org/cgi-bin/y/index.pl?page=news&key=395779536(in Bulgarian)

And although it was a week ago, just today I find some time to blog about it. First of all: it was amazing!!! :-) And second of all: It was really amazing!!! :-) People started coming for the meeting half an hour earlier (well, I came an hour earlier, but who cares?). I had a room with 160 seats reserved, but as It turned out, it was rather small and we had 20-25 people standing up in the hall.

We started with me talking about the web-site, the group and how the idea initially started. Judging on their reactions people were really interested in that. After an hour we continued with Svetlin Nakov, who talked about the Google Web-Toolkit and how we can use it for making AJAX-driven applications. After the presentation we made it to the nearest pub where we continued chatting.

I really can't wait for our next meeting.

On Monday I got the server (x86 platform using Xeon Server Dual Core) I had order, and I immediately started installing it. My desire was to set up on it some king of a Unix (say Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc). I downloaded the Solaris image, burned it and was ready to start having fun. My server doesn't have a DVD, God only knows why since I ordered it explicitly with a DVD. So I started planning of using an external DVD. I bought the external DVD player, placed the disk inside and installation started. I was following this tutorial:

but strangely enough, I didn't get the windows that are shown, but instead, I got a nice blue linux-like-installation screen. After the few questions about the Language, Network, Date/Time, Security and Remote Service Management I got a really strange error, saying "No disks were found". After this a new terminal appeared and, indeed the Solaris couldn't recognize my hard disks. Although, they seem like a pretty normal HDDs: "Western Digital Caviar SE 80 GG, SATA II 300, 7200 rpm, 8MB Cache". So my next guess, was of course to google a little bit, and after a while I found that the problem was caused by the fact that my disks were not formatted, and so didn't have a solaris label. So I installed Slax on my USB and booted the server with it. I formatted and partitioned the disks. Then booted the Solaris again, but the same thing happened again. So I started googling further. Another suggestion that was made was that my RAID controller wasn't recognized. So I disabled it from the BIOS, and tried again. This time the problem was something else. My disks were recognized, but the install program replied that the disk I was using wasn't a Solaris installation disk. And again the sh prompt, which by the way, is really hard to cope with. I checked the /cdrom and it turned out that Solaris couldn't mount the external DVD on the hard disk for some reason. So I had to do it all by myself.

after which the installation went smoothly. So to sum up, everything seems really nice with this OS, but probably the guys from the Solaris dev. team should really think about:

• improving the hardware support (for instance the RAID support and the external DVD).
• maybe improving the documentation a little bit.
• using the bash shell instead of the sh shell.

It was probably in the middle of January, when I found the page on java.net, about Java User Groups ([3]), and figured out there was no JUG in Bulgaria. So I started building one. Looking for a pure java CMS, I found that the choice was not that rich as I thought. Of course I could have used some of the java wikis, like XWiki(which, by the way is awesome - bravo Vincent), but I thought that adopting a wiki for jug site was not what I was looking for. I needed a java CMS, with a news module (where people can post different java-news), with articles module (for posting articles), a poll module, and, of course, a login module.

Later, I found AtLeap CMS[1], which is developed here, in java.net site, and it suited perfect for my initial needs. It fit perfect, not only it had most of the things I was looking for, but also because it was written with the Struts framework which I am really good at. So I installed it, translated the "resources" files, wrote the poll plugin, the article plugin and the functionality for posting comments under every article or news item.

The next step was to find a decent java forum, where people could discuss, and chat. It tuned out that mvnforum [2] was perfect for what I needed. I installed it and I started the testing and bug-fixing phase. The whole system was made by the mid of June, but of course then I had to study for my exams at the university and work over the Cactus project at the ASF, so the whole idea was suspended till the end of July, where I started to work again.

To summon up, I have to say that I am really proud with what was made. I hope that the community we are going to form([3]) will be strong and health.

P.S. I want to help also the other guys that took part in developing the system: Svetozar Ivanov - for helping me integrate the Single-Sign-On between the CMS and the forum, and Miss Mariyana Kombakova for testing the site, and finding me bugs to fix.

public class MagicOutput {

    public static void main(final String argv[]) {

        System.out.println("Hello, World!");

    }

}

public class MyDraft {

	static {
		System.out.println("Hello World JavaGuru!");
		System.exit(0);
	}

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		System.out.println("Hello World!");	
	}
}

public class MagicOutput {

    static String HELLO_WORLD = "Hello, World!";

    static char[] HELLO_GURU_CHARS = "Hello, Java Guru!".toCharArray();

 

    static {

        try {

            Field f;

 

            f = String.class.getDeclaredField("value");

            f.setAccessible(true);

            f.set(HELLO_WORLD, HELLO_GURU_CHARS);

 

            f = String.class.getDeclaredField("count");

            f.setAccessible(true);

            f.setInt(HELLO_WORLD, HELLO_GURU_CHARS.length);

 

        } catch (Exception e) {

            e.printStackTrace();

        }

    }

 

    public static void main(final String[] args) {

        System.out.println("Hello, World!");

    }

}

public String makinStrings() {

	String s = "Fred";

	s = s + "47";

	s = s.substring(2, 5);

	s = s.toUpperCase();

	return s.toString();
}

public static int testMethod() {
	for(;;) {
	}
}