Resolutions for 2010

As an attempt to document my plan for this year, the following are tech-related resolutions for 2010:

1. Learn one or more programming languages.

   I spent most of 2009 working on FEST. Even though I learn a lot more about Swing, enjoyed writing clean and testable object-oriented code, and implemented many interesting features, all the development was done in Java. I think it’s time to learn a new language!

   My plan is to learn at most two languages. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I think that it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to learn a language well. I have worked in Java for quite some time, and I’d love not only to learn a new syntax, but also new programming concepts/paradigms. My intention is to learn Groovy and Scala.

   I wouldn’t want to learn these languages using simplistic exercises. I’d prefer to learn them by working on a non-trivial, useful project. In fact, my plan is to create alternative APIs for FEST-Swing using both Groovy and Scala.

2. Refresh and increase my knowledge of algorithms.

   I have enjoyed studying design patterns and using them both at my day job and on my open source project. Needless to say, it was been a useful and rewarding experience. For one of my side-projects (and to become a better developer,) I’m going to need a deeper knowledge of algorithms, which are also patterns. I already started studying them. My resolution is to not break the chain.

3. Finish and release the FEST record/playback tool.

   This tool will record user interactions with a Swing UI and generate FEST-Swing UI tests. The goal is to generate clean code, as if it was hand-written. This is something that I wanted to do since 2008, but I was too busy building the open source API. I started working on this project a few months ago. Progress has been slow but steady. I hope to have a preview in a couple of months.

   Many thanks to my good friends Andy Glover, Kirill Grouchnikov and Andres Almiray for their valuable feedback and advice :)

4. Figure out a way to create a testing library for JavaFX.

   I’ve been working on a robot-based library for functional testing of JavaFX UIs, similar to FEST-Swing. At this moment I’m stuck. FEST-JavaFX needs to work with compiled JavaFX code, which is different to what we see in a JavaFX script. I have to deal with hierarchies of SGNodes, an implementation detail that can change at any time. It makes sense for what JavaFX tries to accomplish: to have same script executed on different devices. I think it’s time to ask my JavaFX-guru friends for help :)

5. Create a domain-specific language (DSL) for testing UIs.

   The idea here is to create a simple DSL for writing functional UI tests. The target audience are QA engineers that do not know Java. I plan to explore Xtext to accomplish this task.

IMHO, it is an aggressive plan. I hope to be well-organized and focused enough to accomplish most of it :D

Feedback is always welcome! :)

From http://alexruiz.developerblogs.com