Category: Java Development

Java Needs Automatic Properties

One of my main grievances with the Java programming language is it’s lack of Automatic Properties. These have existed in C# since .NET 3.0.

Automatic Properties make property-declaration more concise when no additional logic is required in the property accessors. For example, let’s say we want to implement a simple Book abstraction in an application, with four simple properties for arguments sake.

This is how it may look in C#:

public class Book
{
    public string Name { get; set; }

    public string Author { get; set; }

    public string ISBN { get; set; }

    public string Genre { get; set; }
}

Nice and simple, and written in about 1 minute when coupled with Visual Studio’s intellisense etc.

Now, lets take a look at a class offering the same basic functionality in Java:

public class Book 
{
    public String Name;
    public String Author;
    public String ISBN;
    public String Genre;
    
    public void setName(String name)
    {
        Name = name;
    }
    
    public String getName()
    {
        return Name;
    }
    
    public void setAuthor(String author)
    {
        Author = author;
    }
    
    public String getAuthor()
    {
        return Author;
    }
    
    public void setISBN(String isbn)
    {
        ISBN = isbn;
    }
    
    public String getISBN()
    {
        return ISBN;
    }
    
    public void setGenre(String genre)
    {
        Genre = genre;
    }
    
    public String getGenre()
    {
        return Genre;
    }
}

Just on a lines of code basis, it’s easy to see that C# wins overall. I understand that the designers of Java may not want to add this functionality to the language due to potentially breaking millions of current Java applications – but I’m sure it could be added in such a way that new applications could use it without breaking legacy applications.

Hell, a third party library, Project Lombok, already provides support for using Automatic Properties in Java, so it’s definitely possible.

I find this limitation really frustrating when working with Java.

Back To Java & Some Android Test Automation

I’ve been getting back into some Java programming lately, and for the most part, have enjoyed it immensely. I say ‘for the most part’, because I initially had the misfortune to install the Eclipse IDE. What an absolutely horrible application. OK, it’s great that it’s a free development environment, and for the most part works as expected, but it’s not the most intuitive application to use. One of my main annoyances also was the large amount of Eclipse related project files created for simple projects.

For example, for a simple application created in Eclipse, my ‘.metadata’ folder contain 546 files! I honestly have no idea what 95% of these files were for, and they changed. They changed a lot. For reasons I have no idea of. This really annoyed me as I use SVN as my source control system, and had permanently red folders – I’ve got a touch of OCD when it comes to knowing exactly what files I’ve changed and for what reason. Eclipse lasted three days on my system (two of those were the weekend).

Enter NetBeans 7.0.1. Having last used NetBeans around version 4 (around 2007 I think), I was expecting radical changes. There are some major changes, but to my surprise, all for the better. The simplicity of the IDE has been retained – everything was either where I remembered it, or where I expected it to be – a far superior machine to the aforementioned Eclipse.

My main reason for interacting with Java again, is related to one of my current work projects. I don’t have to say that the mobile applications arena has exploded in the last few years – that statement is quickly becoming a cliché. One of the areas which needs to receive significant attention in my opinion is the area of mobile test automation. Some great tools already exist, but many are in their infancy. The problem also grows when you think of the requirement for any mobile test automation system to work across multiple versions of Android, and also multiple languages.

Doing some research on Friday afternoon, I came across MonkeyRunner. This is an Android supported API that provides the ability to interact with and control Android devices (physical or an emulator).

Deciding to take a look, my first hurdle was setting up my NetBeans IDE to work with the Android SDK. The Android developers documentation is heavily biased towards Eclipse, why I’m not sure. Having been sure someone had faced this challenge before, I turned to Google, and sure enough Binary Wasteland had an excellent article on setting up the Android SDK in NetBeans.

Next question – which test automation requirement to try to implement? The answer – the ability to take screen captures of applications running on an Android device. Our localization department use screen captures heavily, for unit testing of localized UI’s, screen shots for documentation, marketing requests etc. So such a feature would have to be included in any mobile test automation system.

To digress for a moment, I have to mention ADB. The Android Debug Bridge is an excellent command line tool that installs with the Android SDK. It allows you to connect to your Android device (wired or over WiFi), and install applications, remove applications, get certain properties of the device (e.g. the language), dump the entire configuration from the device for use in bug reports, along with many other features. Take a look in the ‘platform-tools’ directory in your Android SDK folder, adb.exe will be located in here. I suggest adding this directory to your Windows PATH variable, as you will find yourself using it a lot.

But back to the feature for taking screen captures of an Android device. This is quite simple. Some examples I found on the internet seem to be out of date since Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) was released. There seems to be a new package called ‘ChimpChat’, which contains a wrapper for the ADB, and also the functionality for taking a screen capture previously contained in the MonkeyRunner package.

Time for some code:


import com.android.chimpchat.core.*;
import com.android.chimpchat.adb.*;

public static void main(String[] args) 
{ 
        AdbBackend adb = new AdbBackend();
        IChimpDevice device = adb.waitForConnection();
        
        IChimpImage image =  device.takeSnapshot();
        image.writeToFile("C:\\Test.png", "png");
        
        device.dispose();
}

The above code will do the following:

  • Create a new instance of the ADB wrapper.
  • Create an IChimpDevice, and wait for a connection.
  • Take a screenshot, and save it to the location specified.
  • Close the connection to the device.

I have some questions though. ADB seems to only support one connected device, and always connects to the first one it finds if more than one device is connected. What if I want to interact with a number of Android devices, e.g. a mobile phone and a tablet? I need to look into this.

I also need to figure out how we will interact with our complex mobile application UI’s, how specific UI elements will be identified, and if we can programmatically switch the language settings on attached Android devices.

But the above is a good start towards a re-usable mobile test automation system.