Why Jenkins does not detect Failures

Jenkins, the brilliant Continuous Integration build server, has a bit of a problem with the Maven surefire jUnit test plugin. Last sunday, I discovered that our Jenkins build server suddenly started ignoring test failures. While the logfile clearly states that the Unittests contain failures, Jenkins marks the builds as “stable”.

After some digging around, I found that even though Jenkins explicitly tells you in the logfile that it will fail the build, it will not do so if the Surefire XML reports are not generated. In our case, somebody in the team decided that the generation of the XML Surefire reports was taking too long and had disabled them in the Maven pom.xml.

In order to solve this, I re-enabled the XML reports and voila, Jenkins happily started reporting errors again. Here is the correct Surefire plugin configuration for you to use in your maven pom.xml file:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.8</version>
    <configuration>

      <!-- Please note that Jenkins needs Surefire
           XML reports in order for detection to work.
           Keep this property set to false. -->
      <disableXmlReport>false</disableXmlReport>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

^H(eaven) key binding in Eclipse

As a long time user of Eclipse, I have never understood the any of the tabs of the Search panel in Eclipse. JavaScript search, Java Search, Remote Search, they all make no sense to a modern man who is used to a single search box which searches everything. So I always use the “File Search” Tab, which does exactly what I want 99% of the time.

File Search always requires mouseclicks. To open the Search window and select the correct tab. It was not until recently that I realized that I could actually reassign the ^H (Control – H) key combination to pop up the File Search tab. If you are an avid Eclipse user you’ve probably already done this, or know how to do this. If you are new to eclipse, or lazy like me, read on to see how you can re-map this key binding.

Changing the Order of your UnitTests

A few months ago we had a problem where Eclipse could not automatically run all jUnit unit tests in a package if that package references a class called “enum”, which is a reserved word in Java 1.6. I’ll spare you the details, but we were forced to create a TestSuite. Normally we avoid this construction because it’s easy to create a new unit test and forget to add it to the correct TestSuit. So as a workaround we wrote some code which could build and return a TestSuite dynamically. Right-click in eclipse, select “Run as Unittest”, sit back and enjoy.

Lately this piece of code came in handy while testing another application, which required the removal of data from a database. Yes I know, Unittests should maybe not depend on databases because it leans towards integration testing, but here we are, and I need to solve it. I used the old TestSuite code and changed it so that the TestCase I needed to run first was singled out, while still maintaining the functionality of auto-detecting testcases in the source folder.

Your Maven Java WEB project in Eclipse WTP

In our company, all Java projects are setup with Maven configuration so that after a “mvn eclipse:eclipse” any developer is generally good to go. One of these projects was a web project but would not transform into a WTP project. By running “mvn eclispe:eclipse” it became a Java project, but could not be added to a Server in Eclipse. It was not a WTP project.

I learned that the author of the project tried but never got the WTP plugin to work properly. Using the Google, I found more people who are having the same problem converting their existing Maven Java Web projects in Eclipse into a WTP project. There are even a few desperate articles describing how to edit your .project and .classpath files. Oh dear. This calls for an article on http://www.rolfje.com.

Why some App Store apps won’t install

I was happily playing around with the appstore, and came across this funny free game called “Hedgewars”. Originally a free Linux game, it apparently got ported to the Mac and put in the App Store, just as a slew of Flash-based games (yes, Steve has some ‘splainin’ to do).

I tried to install Hedgewars on my trusty Mac Mini and got this message saying “This Application can not be installed on this machine”: