Jera Works

JeraWorks is a cross-platform outliner, and JohnBrewer's current development project. You can download a beta at:

I (JohnBrewer), am in the process of converting JeraWorks to an ExtremeProgrammingForOne project. I'll try to keep a log of my progress below:

1/19/00 Added first explicit UnitTests via JUnit (aka JavaUnit).
1/20/00 Posted the first of an (expected) series of JeraWorksUserStories?.
1/20/00 Had my first CodeSmell experience. I needed access to the application global properties object, which I had wisely declared private. As I created a public accessor function, I noticed the smell, noted it in the method comment, and then had an "aha". The only place I need the accessor is in a subclass of Application, so making the accessor protected made the bad smell go away.
1/24/00 Ran into a situation where I didn't call "pack()" on my JDialog before displaying it. Asked myself, "What UnitTest could I have run to avoid this?" and created an AWTTestCase class with an assertIsReasonable(Component c) method. Right now the method just checks to see if c is non-null, and has height and width > 3. I thought of lots of other tests I could add, and would have been on a multi-hour rabbit trail, when "YouArentGonnaNeedIt" dawned on me. I'll add additional tests to assertIsReasonable on an as-needed basis.
1/29/00 I'm going to be consulting for a few days, so it may be a while before the next update.
2/11/00 Just because I'm consulting, doesn't mean I can't be Extreme! One of my first tasks was to write a set of input validation methods. I cranked up JavaUnit, and wrote them test-first. Coding speed was dramatically faster than I'm used to, and I had extremely high confidence in the end product.

Any comments? -- JohnBrewer

Very interesting -- please keep it up!

You seem to have stopped - is there no more?

Please continue, we are very eager to learn your expertise

-- Ravi Shankar