Alonso Del Arte

Published in CodeX

·Sep 3

Less branching might mean more accurate coverage measurement

Getting 100% unit test coverage on your program is an admirable goal. Achieving that goal means that every line in your program that can run does run when the automated unit tests run. In other words, the unit tests activate every line of the tested program (except of course for…

Software Development

6 min read

Less branching might mean more accurate coverage measurement

Sep 2

A chess puzzle for American Chess Day

In the last few hours of September 1, 2022, I learned that the day was American Chess Day, apparently the first one ever. It seems to be something distinct from the National Chess Day that U. S. President Gerald Ford (R, 1974–1976) declared October 9, 1976 to be. It’s somewhat…

Chess

2 min read

Published in CodeX

·Aug 3

What exactly is a framework anyway?

Like “API,” the term “framework” is casually thrown around by computer programmers, its meaning taken for granted by some and misunderstood by others, leaving some others confused. They wonder: What exactly is a framework? I was among those who take the meaning of the term for granted. But when asked…

Java

6 min read

Aug 1

Some Salesforce developer job postings are wrong

Salesforce is everywhere, yet many developers don’t even know what Salesforce is. This means that qualified Salesforce developers with just a few months of experience can demand and get better salaries than developers with a little experience in better known technologies. If wisdom is knowing what you don’t know, then…

Salesforce

7 min read

Published in Dev Genius

·Jul 6

Avoid Java wildcard imports… but why?

To organize the various classes and interfaces a Java program needs, we can put them in packages. Then you can fully qualify the name of a Java class or interface according to the package it comes from. For example, java.util.List<java.util.Currency> currencies = new java.util.ArrayList<java.util.Currency>(); That can get old fast. So…

Java

5 min read

Published in CodeX

·Jun 1

Finer points of Java: the difference between nested, inner and anonymous classes

A Java project usually has several classes, each defined in its own source file by itself. Sometimes, though, it’s convenient to put one Java class inside another. Here’s a toy example: package org.example; public class EnclosingClass { class EnclosedClass { } } If I referred to EnclosedClass as an “inner…

Java

8 min read

Published in CodeX

·May 18

Use cases for inner classes in Java

In a linked list, each node has an obvious and predictable relationship to other nodes in the list. The nodes of a linked list can be implemented as instances of a private class nested in the linked list class. As we saw in my article about nested static classes, the…

Java

5 min read

Published in CodeX

·May 5

A couple of use cases for nested static classes in Java

Whenever you can use an anonymous class, you can use a named nested static class instead. But that only makes sense if you need to instantiate the class from two or more places. That’s probably not going to be the case with an iterator, but it’s likely to be the…

Java

3 min read

Published in CodeX

·May 3

A couple of use cases for anonymous classes in Java

When I first learned about anonymous classes in Java, I didn’t quite see the point. I understood the syntax well enough to recognize anonymous classes in applications of Java’s Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT). Those didn’t quite seem to make sense to me. You want a particular window to close when…

Java

5 min read

May 3

Exploring the Collatz conjecture on the Scala REPL

Yesterday I wrote about the Collatz conjecture. I mentioned that you can use a computer to help you explore the Collatz conjecture. If you have Scala on your computer, you can use the Scala Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) sort of like a Mathematica or Python notebook. You can use the Scala REPL…

Collatz Conjecture

3 min read