Tech

Using reusable styles and themes to modify an Android application’s look is really easy and helps to not violate thy DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principle by typing styles in every single UI element again and again. In the following tutorial we’re going to write and apply some simple styles and a finally theme to a simple Android application. Prerequisites The following environment is needed to follow this tutorial … Java Development Kit 6 Android SDK An AVM with at least Android 2.2 / API Version 8 I recommend using Eclipse with the ADT Plugin installed ...

In today’s tutorial we’re going to take a look on how to handle periodically scheduled tasks on our Android device by using BroadcastReceivers, Services and the AlarmManager. Prerequisites The following environment is needed to follow this tutorial … Java Development Kit 6 Android SDK An AVM with at least Android 2.2 / API Version 8 I recommend using Eclipse with the ADT Plugin installed The Concept We’re going to create a first broadcast receiver that gets initiated at boot time. This component then should make use of Android’s AlarmManager API and schedule a cyclic task using an explicit intent. ...

The MemoryAnalyzer Plugin for Eclipse allows us to quickly analyze heap dumps from a virtual machine and search for memory leaks. In the following tutorial we’re going to create and run a small application that is going to cause an OutOfMemoryException during its runtime. In addition, we’re forcing the virtual machine to save a heap dump and finally analyzing this data using Eclipse and the MemoryAnalyzer plugin. Prerequisites Java Development Kit 6 Eclipse Indigo ...

Figure 1. REST-assured Integration Test Tutorial Logo There are many frameworks out there to facilitate testing RESTful webservices but there is one framework I’d like to acquaint you with is my favourite framework named REST-assured. REST-assured offers a bunch of nice features like a DSL-like syntax, XPath-Validation, Specification Reuse, easy file uploads and those features we’re going to explore in the following article. With a few lines of code and Jersey I have written a RESTful web service that allows us to explore the features of the REST-assured framework and to run tests against this service. ...

The Tomcat Maven Plugin not only allows us to deploy our mavenized application to an existing Tomcat server but also to run our web application with an embedded instance from our project’s directory. Recently I needed to add basic authentication to such an instance and wanted to share the steps necessary here Prerequisites We just need Maven and a JDK … Java Development Kit >= 6 Maven 3 Project Setup I am using the webapp archetype here We’re adding the following configuration for the Tomcat plugin to your pom.xml – my final descriptor is this one pom.xml...

In today’s Android tutorial we’re going to take a look at Android’s Widget API and how to make a widget interact with a service using intents. Figure 1. hasCode Android Widget Tutorial Logo We’re going to create a fully functional application that allows us to enable or disable our smartphone’s screen lock settings using a widget that can be placed on our home screen. Finally, I am going to show how to use a smartphone to test and debug our application and connect it to the IDE. ...

Today we’re going to take a look at the Maven Embedded GlassFish Plugin and how it allows us quick creation of GlassFish server instances in no time and Java EE 6 application deployment. Figure 1. GlassFish + Maven With a few lines of configuration in your Maven’s pom.xml we’ve got a running GlassFish instance and are able to redeploy our application fast by pressing enter in our console. In the following tutorial we’re going to build a Java EE 6 Web Application with a stateless session bean and a web servlet and finally deploy – and redeploy the application using the Maven GlassFish Plugin. ...

Today we’re going to take a look at two specific frameworks that enables you to efficiently test your REST-ful services: On the one side there is the framework REST-assured that offers a nice DSL-like syntax to create well readable tests – on the other side there is the Jersey-Test-Framework that offers a nice execution environment and is built upon the JAX-RS reference implementation, Jersey. In the following tutorial we’re going to create a simple REST service first and then implement integration tests for this service using both frameworks. ...

Sometimes in a developer’s life there is no clean API available to gather information from a web application .. no SOAP, no XML-RPC and no REST .. just a website hiding the information we’re looking for somewhere in its DOM hierarchy – so the only solution is screenscraping. Screenscraping always leaves me with a bad feeling – but luckily there is a tool that makes this job at least a bit easier for a developer .. jsoup to the rescue! ...

Using the contract-first approach to define a web service offers some advantages in contrast to the code-first approach. In the following tutorial we’re going to take a look at some details of this approach and we’re going to implement a real SOAP service using JAX-WS, Maven and the Eclipse IDE. Finally we’re going to run our service implementation on an embedded Jetty instance and we’re going to take a look at soapUI and how to test our service using this neat tool. ...