Code coverage, Hibernate integration, and other fun things.

Hello everyone,

Lately our project has been progressing very nicely. My colleague had written a small program to parse raw data into an SQL-friendly form, so we are not restricted to test data anymore. This has the nice side-effect of boosting motivation because we are dealing with the Real Thing now.

My focus lately has been on adding a comments section to the web app. In our schema, we have a few different comment tables for different types objects. Luckily in the Java code we can just make all of them derive from a BasicCommentBean so we can be lazy. I've made the comments section as generic as possible and self-contained.

With this setup, you can reference comments.jsp and set the required attributes (a comment data source namely) and everything else is handled for Free by CommentController. We also perform server-side validation on the user input and sanitize it via the apache.commons.lang library to prevent malicious code execution on the client. Oh and we have some nice ajax and animation going on courtesy of jQuery...

Now that we're using real data, we've integrated Hibernate. Oddly enough, the process was surprisingly painless, but I wouldn't be care-free just yet... I don't have a ton of experience with Hibernate, but so far it's pretty straightforward once the mappings are working correctly.

One last think: I've been experimenting with code coverage via the EclEmma plugin for eclipse. It's nicely integrated and I've used it to see how much code coverage our unit tests are providing (63% ... looks like room to improve). Over the next few days/weeks/etc. I hope to use it more extensively to improve our tests and coverage of the important parts of the project.