Tag: java

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A super simple Magento store monitoring tool powered by Google App Engine

I took a bit of a break for the usual Magento development last weekend and had a crack at making a simple webstore monitoring app using Google App Engine. The application was made to monitor our webstores from a reliable, US network – and who more reliable than Google? So this blog post will detail the site monitoring app, and my thoughts on the Google app engine platform. I’d also invite anyone to try my app and let me know any thoughts you have on it, or how I could improve it.

UPDATE July 2011: I have since created a much more fully features Magento monitoring tool called magespeedtest.com – it checks speed and performance regularly and emails you if it differs from your preset tolerance. I won’t be adding new features to this monitor, it’s still free and I’ll keep it up and running for as long as it makes sense to, but any future development will be on MageSpeedTest.com.

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PHP 1, Java 0: The method assertEquals(Object, Object) is ambiguous for the type

Th old Ashley would never say this, maybe I’ve been working with PHP too long, but seriously, I’m going to have to side with the dynamic language crowd on this one – I think I have been spending too much time developing with Magento!

After an Eclipse upgrade a whole raft of my unit tests started failing to compile with the error: The method assertEquals(Object, Object) is ambiguous for the type. What this means is I’m passing an int and and Integer into a method that has two different signatures: assertEquals(Object, Object) and assertEquals(int, int) both of which could be called, thanks to autoboxing.
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shuffle() or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love PHP

I have said some not very nice things about PHP on this blog, and I’m sure over time I’ll be adding more such criticisms. This time I’d like to highlight a handy little feature in PHP, one that is a great deal easier to use than it’s Java counterpart.

Shuffling the elements in an array is probably a programming exercise in every single 1st year computer science textbook, it’s easy enough to do, but because it’s been done roughly 100 million times before, it feels moronic doing it again. So it’s nice when programming languages offer it as standard language functionality. PHP does by way of the shuffle() function and Java does by Collections.shuffle() static method. Seems simple enough, except that an array is not a collection in Java. So you can’t take your int[] and shuffle the elements quite so easily.

If you have an Integer[] in Java you can just pass it into Arrays.asList(array), get the collection and shuffle it. Uh oh, I said Integer[] which sadly is not the same as an int[]! So the difference between the two means I’m going to need to convert all the elements of the int[] into a Integer[] before I can shuffle it, geez, if I have to iterate the list once to convert type, I may as well just not put them back where I found them!

So this is me admitting there is an advantage to a dynamic language. I maintain I’d still rather pay the upfront cost of a few extra lines of code here-and-there for type safety, try getting a PHP IDE to reliably autocomplete instance methods for you, when it doesn’t know the type of a variable! Perhaps I need to start using Eiffel…