What is Recession?

This story is about a man who once upon a time was selling Hotdogs by the roadside. He was illiterate, so he never read newspapers. He was hard of hearing, so he never listened to the radio. His eyes were weak, so he never watched television. But enthusiastically, he sold lots of hotdogs.
He was smart enough to offer some attractive schemes to increase his sales. His sales and profit went up. He ordered more a more raw material and buns and sold more. He recruited more supporting staff to serve more customers. He started offering home deliveries. Eventually he got himself a bigger and better stove. As his business was growing, the son, who had recently graduated from college, joined his father.
Then something strange happened.
The son asked, "Dad, aren't you aware of the great recession that is coming our way?" The father replied, "No, but tell me about it." The son said, "The international situation is terrible. The domestic situation is even worse. We should be prepared for the coming bad times."
The man thought that since his son had been to college, read the papers, listened to the radio and watched TV. He ought to know and his advice should not be taken lightly. So the next day onwards, the father cut down the his raw material order and buns, took down the colorful signboard, removed all the special schemes he was offering to the customers and was no longer as enthusiastic. He reduced his staff strength by giving layoffs. Very soon, fewer and fewer people bothered to stop at his Hotdog stand. And his sales started coming down rapidly and so did the profit. The father said to his son, "Son, you were right". "We are in the middle of a recession and crisis. I am glad you warned me ahead of time."
Moral of the Story: It's all in your MIND! And we actually FUEL this recession much more than we think.

What is Google Voice?

A phone management service which allows - “one phone number for all your phones, for life.”
https://www.google.com/voice/about

Testing I18N..

I18N Testing Guidelines and Techniques
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/i18n/I18N_Testing.html
Looks like some help for building my testing strategy for I18N. Need to explore..

Learning to write Unit Tests for GWT..

http://code.google.com/docreader/#p=google-web-toolkit-doc-1-5&s=google-web-toolkit-doc-1-5&t=DevGuideJUnitCreation http://code.google.com/docreader/#p=google-web-toolkit-doc-1-5&s=google-web-toolkit-doc-1-5&t=GettingStartedJUnit

Heard new acronyms..

BIRT - Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools
http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/
JBPM - JBoss jBPM
http://www.jboss.com/products/jbpm
SEAM - JBoss Seam
http://www.jboss.com/products/seam

Need to explore more...

Getting started with GWT..

http://extjs-gwt.blogspot.com/
I found this blog very useful to get my first GWT app running in my eclipse workspace.

Using the right DB increased test coverage 10 times !!!

I have not worked on any web application which doesn' t connect to database. If we intend to write our application thru our tests or even vice versa, it becomes quite necessary that the DB we are using gives a great deal of support to the fact.
What support?
- Quickness
- ease of rebuilding
- smooth to handle with a programming language

I worked on an application recently which had no unit tests. When I joined the team I spoke to the team about benefits of tests - both unit and acceptance. The project had good amount automated acceptance tests though.

We tried the idea of in-memory DB - HSQLDB. This is a light weight database made in Java language. Using ANT (with hibernate) we created tasks like -
- generateSchema
- createDatabase
- populateDatabase
- deleteDatabase
Using these tasks we had great control over the DB. Moreover the DB being light and in-memory made writing tests very quick. We even configured it in Cruise Control.
Initially before we started with HSQLDB 10 days back, our test coverage was 3% and now it is 30%, growing exponentially.