Brain Murmurs

One of our new products is a BlackBerry application, and I’ve been pretty much steeped in a unit test trance for the last few weeks over it.

I’m borrowing from XP methodology and writing the test cases before I actually write the code, and in this case, it’s been somewhat of a bear to manage. The advantages of this approach are great, in the sense that it helps your design process (you’re immediately thinking concretely about how your code will be used instead of off screwing around in Ivory Tower Land) and that your code is (hopefully) well wrung-out before you start slapping a user interface on top of it.

There have been a few advantages in this go-around that I didn’t have with Pulse. Pulse was a Bluetooth application, and the RIM JDE flatout does NOT support running Bluetooth applications in the simulator at this time. This meant that all code had to be run on a real BlackBerry and debugged over a serial line. Any time you made a change you had to recompile, re-sign, delete the old application from the BlackBerry, install the new application on the BlackBerry, connect the debugger, watch it blow up, and then start all over.

This application doesn’t use Bluetooth, so I’m able to run in the simulator, thank god. Furthermore, I’m able to test this code in J2MEUnit, which has been a big help.

Filed under: Dan by Daniel