Nat Pryce

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Nat Pryce is an independent consultant. He has his own website at http://www.natpryce.com

He currently works at BSkyB in London on their Set Top Box software team.

Before that...

He was a consultant at Credit Suisse
He was a consultant at BAML
He was an "Überdeveloper" at UBS
He was an "Überdeveloper" at Sky Network Services
He was an "EnterpriseArchitect" at BNP Paribas
He was a consultant at ThoughtWorks
He was Technical Director of B13 Media, a technology, design and management consultancy that specialised in the sports and sports marketing industries.
He experienced the ups and downs of the dot-com bubble at Quokka Sports Inc.
He received a PhD at Imperial College, London. His thesis, entitled Component Interaction in Distributed Systems, is on-line at http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~np2/phd.html.

I'm using this as my home page on the WikiWikiWeb. If you want to leave me a message, append it to the the bottom of this page and I should notice it pretty soon.

I did a lot of work in distributed systems, middleware, components and frameworks. Check out my old home-page at Imperial http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~np2 for more info about my research in those areas.

Based on my work on distributed component-based systems and frameworks, I contributed to the ComponentDesignPatterns. I have concentrated on the lower-levels of the pattern language, focusing on what distinguishes a component, how components are defined and how they interact. The patterns I have documented include AbstractInteractions, ThirdPartyBinding, ComponentBus and ComponentGlue. Feel free to add comments; feedback is very useful.

Related to the ComponentDesignPatterns, I collected patterns of software systems that use scripting (e.g. AlternateHardAndSoftLayers) or are written in scripting languages. They are available at http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~np2/patterns/scripting.

I did quite a bit of Java programming and contributed to the collection of JavaIdioms and to the discussion on ExceptionPatterns.

A lot of the Java idoms and ideas relating to the design and implementation of component-based frameworks are used in a framework I wrote called SceneBeans. Documentation and code are on-line at http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/Software/SceneBeans/.

I am interested in TestDrivenProgramming. I wrote the first version of the dynamic MockObjects library for Java that became jMock (http://www.jmock.org), now maintained by OliBye. JMock begat HamCrest, which is now used by JavaUnit. I have also written WindowLicker, for test-driving GUI code and TeamPiazza? (http://team-piazza.googlecode.com), a build monitor plug-in for the TeamCity? ContinuousIntegration server.

I am interested in PostModernProgramming (see http://www.postmodernprogramming.org) and ran a ScrapheapChallengeWorkshop? at OOPSLA'05, PoMoPro? 2006 and SPA 2007 that investigated this topic.

I am a regular at the ExtremeTuesdayClub and have been involved in the London XpDay? since the first conference in 2000. I was programme chair in 2004 and 2005, and poster chair in 2006.

I was honoured to receive the Gordon Pask award from the Agile Alliance in 2006.

I have a blog at http://www.natpryce.com.

Nat - Thanks for your post on TestDataBuilders. How do you solve the problem of testing DAOs with persistent data using data builders? Thanks. I can be reached via the comment form on www.systemmobile.com.

My colleague James Richardson has written a good article explaining how we test persistence code with JUnit and TestDataBuilders: http://www.time4tea.net/wiki/display/MAIN/Testing+Persistent+Objects+Without+Spring

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