Monday 22 April 2013

When Grails Attacks

I've been pretty harsh on Grails before but I'm starting to appreciate some of its charms now. Of course I still think Play! 2.1 is even better but must admit there are fewer OMFGWTFBBQ?!?! moments with Groovy compared to Scala. That might just be me and my functional-programming newb-ness, or it might just be that while Groovy is a new front door on Java, Scala is a new top floor, roof and swimming pool out the back...

 Anyway.

Innocently trying to run some unit tests on an existing set of Grails controllers. Everybody else seems to be running them fine, but I get:

| Running 9 unit tests... 1 of 9
| Failure:  testThatAAABBDDD(BrokenAssTests)
|  java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot set property 'method' on null object
 at BrokenAssTests.setup(BrokenAssTests.groovy:155)
| Running 9 unit tests... 2 of 9
| Failure:  testThatEEEFFGGG(BrokenAssTests)
|  java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot set property 'method' on null object
 at BrokenAssTests.setup(BrokenAssTests.groovy:155)

The setup() method in question:
  @Before
  public void setup() {
    request.method = 'GET'
  }

 Same Groovy version, same Grails version, very similar Java version (1.7.0_11 vs 1.7.0_21, hardly a biggie), so what's going on?

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04, everyone else is on Macs (a story for another day).

A great deal of digging and Googling later, and here's what's going on:


  • Grails 2.0 introduced the TestFor annotation which automagically mixes in the ControllerUnitTestMixin  
  • As one of its many magic tricks, the ControllerUnitTestMixin adds mocked request and response objects into the test scope
  • This magic is performed in method bindGrailsWebRequest() which if you persue the documentation, has the JUnit 4 @Before annotation applied
  • The only ordering guarantee about @Before evaluation is "superclass comes before subclass"
  • But a mixin is NOT a superclass!
  • And so the order of @Before evaluation when using Grails' test mixins is essentially OS/JVM dependent
In my case, I was the unlucky "canary" on the "different" platform who encountered the bug. The "fix", such as it was, was manually calling the mixin method just-in-time in "our" setup() method:
  @Before
  public void setup() {
    if (!request) {
      bindGrailsWebRequest()  // Make sure request is visible - the ordering of @Befores is not guaranteed :-(
    }
    request.method = 'GET'
  }
I don't like it much, and hopefully the next version of Grails rectifies this, but for me it's just another one of those "too many layers of magic" problems that in my experience seems to afflict the Groovy world more than others.

Thursday 18 April 2013

Backfillin'

One of my motivations for getting back into blogging after a considerable hiatus is the rise of the "cloud-based infrastructure" solutions which make it so much easier not just to host a software solution, but to develop one as well.

"The cloud" is a nebulous (see what I did there?) concept at best but strip away the management-pitched advertising and there are some amazing offerings out there for low- and no-cost.

As such I will be backfilling content from my old self-hosted Pebble blog onto this blog. I won't censor anything except for my ill-fated "setting up your own development server" series which, after a ludicrous number of instalments, is basically the best advertisement Cloudbees' Jenkins-As-A-Service could ever wish for!

Monday 15 April 2013

Ubuntu Wubi: Here Be Dragons

After being handed a rather low-spec ThinkPad at my new gig, and attempting to get work done in a locked-down corporate Windows 7 installation, I gave up after two days. The main reason being Cygwin. It's cool and all, but it's not Linux. All the cool kids write install/run scripts that almost work in Cygwin, but not quite. Usually something to do with slashes and backslashes. The third time I had to go diving into someone else's shell script which would *just work* on Linux/Mac, I'd had enough.

Off to the Ubuntu site I trundled, and my eye was caught by the Wubi option - Install Ubuntu from "inside" Windows, thus minimising my unproductive "watch the progress meter" time.

So here is my advice for anyone who does more with their computer than light web-browsing or a spot of word-processing, strictly one app at a time:

Do NOT, under any circumstances, use Wubi to get Ubuntu onto your machine.

What you get after a Wubi Ubuntu installation is a disk image stored in your Windows directory, which you can choose from a boot loader, and it feels "just like Ubuntu". Because it is Ubuntu. Being run in a virtual disk, mounted from an NTFS partition. There are a lot of moving parts in that last sentence, and therein lies the problem.

Undoubtedly is a remarkable and clever achievement to be able to do all of the boot-record-jiggery and virtual-file-system-pokery from within a "hostile" operating system. But just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

My experience of the Ubuntu 12.10 OS running from a Wubi install was universally positive, until I started actually multitasking. Like this (each bullet being an "async task" as it were):

  • Open new Terminal -> Start pulling down new and large git updates
  • Open new Terminal tab ->Start pulling new and large SVN updates
  • Open new Terminal tab -> Kick off a grails application build and test
  • Open Chrome -> GRIND. BANG. LOCKUP
It seems the filesystem-intensive work being done in the terminal (particularly the Grails job that does a lot of temporary file twiddling) makes the virtual disk driver work hard, which in turn makes the NTFS filesystem driver do a lot of work. And between the two of them, they lock up THE ENTIRE MACHINE. Lights-on, nobody-home style. Press-and-hold-the-power-button style.

Then, after deciding you've had enough of your Wubi-based install, you have a very considerable number of fiery hoops to jump through to get your stuff out of its clutches and into a real disk mounted on a real filesystem.

So when (not if) you decide to liberate a corporate machine from Windows, take the hit and do the job properly - boot into the installer the way God/Shuttleworth intended, partition the disk correctly and enjoy.

Tuesday 9 April 2013

Scala *is* Clean Code

Reading, learning, marvelling at Martin Odersky's creation thanks to his great book.

Everything I try (usually within the Play! 2.1 framework as that's just the cherry on top) just works, and as I learn more, I find 5 lines condenses to 3, condenses to 2, with no reduction in readability (as long as I name my variables properly).

My conclusion is that Scala is the closest thing I've seen to the physical embodiment of the Clean Code ideal. Huzzah!