I admit it. I haven’t posted for nearly two years. Since I’m socially-distancing and keeping at home due to Coronavirus COVID-19 concerns. May as well put the time to good use eh?
Since the last written post, so much has happened. I’ve sold all my laptops except one. I’ve set it up as a dual-boot and I’m happy with it. Boots Windows 10 and my distro is KDE Neon 18.04.
It’s a good distro, so far. It does the things I expect of it. I’ve added the Cinnamon desktop environment as I’m used to the key combinations (hotkeys) to do desktop switching. I’ve even got the Nemo file manager properly opening a terminal and this is due in large part to the great Ubuntu and Mint communities out there on the old interwebs.
I have done quite a bit of Development work while in furlough (again thanks Covid-19 => you suck), but mainly the work has focused on Automated Acceptance testing with BDD. Namely:
• Python with Behave
• Eclipse Java with Cucumber
• IntelliJ Java with Cucumber
So far, the easiest I’ve found to set up and run out-of-the box is Python and behave. With IntelliJ as a close second.
With Eclipse, I fell into the old “follow an old tutorial down dependency nightmares in the waiting” trap. Yah. Probably a few changes since 2016 can do that. While I did learn a lot about Cucumber BDD from the lesson, I could not get the most trivial of cucumber-driven IDE functionality to work without error. That is, until I found this really cool tutorial cucumber eclipse maven project that made use of Maven and a pom.xml file, containing just the needed dependencies.
It then requires a few “maven” build and test steps, but then its good to go. About 98% in my view.
Why only 98%? Because if you’re anything like me, you prefer that the IDE show no errors, and no warnings. at. all.
I do get a warning that the cucumber plugin feature of discovering the step implementations will not work because it is not a cucumber project. Yeah. I know that, it’s a maven project.
I guess I’ll have to experiment more to see if I can get to 100 on my own. Hey, I do have the free time, right?
Actually there are a few more courses I’d like to complete on Pluralsight since they were cool enough to give “Free April” which is tick tick ticking away.
Anyway, if you’ve got thoughts to share, feel free to drop me a line.