Apache Maven is more than just build automation. When positioned at the very heart of your development strategy, Apache Maven can become a force multiplier not just for individual developers but for Agile teams and managers. This article covers some of the most prevalent, popular, and proven software engineering practices like build automation and project modularization.

This article describes five useful Node.js tools for your client-side JavaScript development workflow.

This article aims to teach you about some of the more common refactoring options, as well as to show you ways to use these options in everyday situations with your Java technology source code.

This book excerpt develops the classes needed to implement functionality for a sample application. The chapter covers object-relational mapping, how to install HSQLDB, database design, writing a Data Definition Language (DDL) script using Ant, and setting up and understanding more advanced areas of Hibernate.

What if you were able to discover potential problems in your code prior to building it? Interestingly enough, there are Eclipse plugins for tools such as JDepend and CheckStyle that can help you discover problems before they are manifested in software. In this installment of Automation for the people, automation expert Paul Duvall provides examples of installing, configuring, and using these static analysis plugins in Eclipse so that you can prevent problems early in the development life cycle.

XMLBeans gives an object view of underlying XML data without losing access to the original XML info set, and delivers performance benefits via incremental unmarshalling and efficient methods to access XML schema built-in data types. These two features, along with nearly 100 percent support for XML schema, and provisions for on-time validation of XML data during data manipulation, make XMLBeans very useful for XML-Java data binding.

This paper gives a complete description of code coverage analysis (test Applying Mock objects effectively is a key factor when performing Test Driven Development (TDD). In this article I'll introduce the basics of using JMock, a Mock object framework, in conjunction with Test-Driven Development. To illustrate the technique I will work through a case study, the creation of a cache component by means of test-first development with JMock.

Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) programming techniques are increasingly dominating the world of Web application development. New developers are stepping into the world of Ajax development every day, and they come from disparate development backgrounds. Part 1 of this multipart series gives you a cheat sheet of Ajax development resources from an expert team of Ajax developers at IBM®. The authors draw from their own ramp-up experiences to help you with practical information that will put you on a fast track to effective Ajax development.

Rather than preach on about the virtues of testing, I'm going to walk you through a simple example of test-driven development (TDD) using RSpec. The RSpec tool is a Ruby package that lets you build a specification alongside your software. This specification is actually a test that describes the behavior of your system. Here's the flow for development with RSpec:
* You write a test. This test describes the behavior of a small element of your system.
* You run the test. The test fails because you have not yet built the code for that part of your system. This important step tests your test case, verifying that your test case fails when it should.
* You write enough code to make the test pass.
* You run the tests and verify that they pass.

In essence, an RSpec developer turns test cases from red (failing) to green (passing) all day. It's a motivating process. In this article, I walk you through working with the basics in RSpec.

This article introduces the Microsoft AJAX Library and the JavaScript library for ASP.NET AJAX 1.0.