Monthly Archives: July 2008

Legal email characters regexp

I use GMail for most of my mail. They have a cool feature with which you can add a string to your username part of the email address by ading a +-sign, like this: myusername+astring@gmail.com. Email sent to this address will go to myusername@gmail.com.

This is perfect when you register your email at many sites since you can sort the incoming mail based on the email address given.

The problem is, many email forms have validators that don’t allow +-signs in the email address. I just tried registering at developer.sonyericsson.com but they wouldn’t accept my email.

There’s really no reason for this. There are regular expressions available that do a correct validation. Here’s one example.

Standard

JMUnit: simple and good enough

I ended up using JMUnit for my mobile java project. The Sony Ericsson jUnit tool is great when you have to run the tests from a PC on a real device or from a “real” jUnit application. It’s a more advanced tool, but for my needs at the moment, it’s a bit overkill.

So I ended up with what can only be described as the direct opposite: JMUnit is extremey simple. If I change my mind in the future, converting the test cases to jUnit shouldn’t be too difficult.

Standard

Unit testing java mobile

I used to work for Sony Ericsson and my first job for the company was developing the J2ME SDK. The last thing I did as a developer was initiating the Mobile jUnit development (another guy finished it, though, and he should get the credit for it becoming a great tool.)

This was a couple of years ago and now when I am in the need for a unit testing framework for Java ME it seems not much has happened. There seems to be basically three options and none of them seems very actively developed. I wonder why.

Standard

Subversion and dav using https: Method PROPFIND is not defined

The following error message can occur when trying to use subversion on an apache2 server over https and dav:

501 Method PROPFIND is not defined in RFC 2068 and is not supported by the Servlet API.

The error message is quite misleading. It can be caused by a simple misspelling of the server. In my case I tried to connect to zyx.server.com when the actual address was xyz.server.com.

Standard

The beta is dead, long live the beta

Beta is not what it used to be.

It used to mean “buggy and unusable”, meant to be used in a transition phase from development to finished product. Now it means “usable, but still under development” or “we’re still adding new features” – or maybe just “free”. That’s slightly different.

Well, it’s actually very different.

The change is of course due to the internet and the ever more powerful web browser as an application platform. Moving your application to the internet means moving them into another heartbeat rhythm compared to the heydays of Win32 applications (or any similar platform of course). You’re going from nothing, nothing, RELEASE, patch, nothing, nothing, RELEASE, patch, nothing, nothing… to release, release, release, release…

Needless to say this has a major impact on the development process used for building the software. Feedback from users is instantaneous, updates can be applied in a flash, downtime affects every single one of your users and best of all – no one has to install anything.

This should of course influence how you manage your software project. When the cost of each new release goes down, you can make many of them. The beginning and the end of the project might be unclearer, it’s more of an ongoing upgrade and improvement.

There are books written about software maintenance. That used to mean the phase of development after the release.

Software projects of today are in a constant maintenance mode. Beta has gone from the exception to the normal state of things.

So, maybe the software maintenance face is a thing of the past, but the beta is more alive than ever.

Standard