Googlielmo's blog

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Starting from today I want to share part of my knowledge about SoapUI (as promised at the end of the post http://googlielmo.blogspot.ie/2013/12/dance-into-groovy.html ). I used this tool for some years in order to perform load testing and integration testing and I found it really helpful. SoapUI is a tool that allows any kind of functional and not functional testing. Despite its name it is not limited to the SOAP protocol and to web services only: you can perform tests for different protocols (HTTP/S, REST, JDBC, AMF, etc.) and application layers. It was born to be used for SOAP web services testing, but then it evolved to be a general purpose testing tool. It comes in two editions, Open Source and Pro. The first one is free to use and you can modifiy the source code too, according to the LGPL license. The second one is commercial and closed source. In this post and the following I will refer to the Open Source edition. The companies I worked for in the last years didn't want to

Since I started my first job in the IT (a looong time ago) I have noticed that every 6 months there are some buzz words that suddenly become trendy and everyone goes crazy for them. This happened for many things (languages, framework, methodologies, OSs, technologies, best practices, etc.) but it never happened for logging (or at least not yet). The importance of logging (and log analysis) for applications and systems today is still something of secondary importance in many environments. Logging is important and it should be done following some best practices: a good logging can give a lot of useful info about the behaviour of an application at runtime and can speed the identification of problems or potencial problems; a bad logging can affect the performances of a system and can lead people in the wrong direction resulting in a loss of time (and money) to find a solution to the wrong problem. In this post I want to show you a list of best practices to follow in application logging. Th

Groovy ( http://groovy.codehaus.org/ ) is an Object Oriented scripting language for the Java platform. It is dinamically compiled to bytecode for the Java Virtual Machine. It can use and interoperate with any Java class and library (any, not only the ones provided by the JDK) and it has a Java-like syntax: this way its learning curve for a Java depeloper is almost close to zero. Groovy is very powerful and can help in different areas: in some future post I will show and explain better its benefits. In this one I want to show you just a concrete example of use from me in the past. Many times we had to deal with the move of hundreds of Oracle schemas from an envirnoment to another (dev, test, QA, production) or to migrate them from an Oracle release to another. Every time the DBAs regularly forgot to set up the DB links for the new environment. This generated errors that couldn't often be identified quickly. In order to avoid this I wrote a set of Groovy scripts to check the sanity o