Zendlab - Death and Rebirth

TDD (Test Driven Development) in ASP/VBScript

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:46:00 GMT

Introduction

This article deals with an idea that I believe to be one of the key concepts of modern programming. When I say modern, I'm referencing to methodologies that re-appeared with hype names and excessive power during the second half of the 90's and the beginning of the 21^st century as an answer to the bureaucratic, slow and heavy regulated methods in use at the time. As some of their examples are: ASD(Adaptive Software Development), DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method), Scrum, XP(Extreme Programming) among others...

These methodologies, that were known as lightweight methods until year 2001 and then became the Agile Software Development, have some aspects in common. At first, they were "born" from the developers necessity to focus more on the product in which they're working on than in hard processes related to development. It means that, unlike the classic long-term strategies and specifications that predict and document the entire project from the beginning to the end, the development is made in small iterations, with minimal planning. Another important factor is that these methodologies are in favour of face-to-face communication rather than written documentation among the team members (which are small, around 5-9 people). Third and most important to all programmers, in my humble opinion, is the constant execution of automated tests in all steps to ensure the quality of each small unit of code they generate.

Despite being an interesting topic, I'll stop my wondering here, because it's not my goal to teach techniques to manage software teams, but to teach one of the things that all of those techniques will be require you to do. Before anything, I want to remind you that a programmer will always program, so that doesn't matter too much what methodology is adopted by the company where you are working on. For fun, below is a strip from Geek Hero Comic that was kindly provided by the author Salvatore Iovene for this article:

For those who don't know yet, this is the third article of a series that I committed myself to write. Here is the list of articles:

ASP, a misinterpreted technology
Event-Driven-Programming and lambda function in ASP/VBScript.
TDD (Test Driven Development) in ASP/VBScript.
Languages: Based on Objects and Object Oriented.
Object Oriented in ASP/VBScript "Hackers way".
"Scripting Components", the ace in the role.
Caching: the concept of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) applied to ASP.

If you're reading one of my articles for the first time, I strongly recommend that you read the previous ones first, because I'm trying to lead you into a great abstraction, presenting the topics incrementally.

Projects are now on GitHub

Fri, 29 May 2009 04:43:00 GMT

Better late than never! From now on, all my recent open-source contributions will be available at my github.com account. The current projects are:

ASP Xtreme Evolution (my ASP framework)
Exuberant-ctags (updates to make it's ASP parsing better)
Gedit-* (a lot of good things for gedit)
GTKSourceView-2.0 (updates to add/enhance language.specs)
jquery-vs-mootools (this one is an interesting article I translated)

Although this blog isn't being informative and updated as I think it should be, I'm currently very active and developing a lot of things but not writing much about it. Watching my git account will help you to keep the track of the latest updates in my software development. Enjoy!

Tidy and GeSHi WebServices for the mankind

Mon, 11 May 2009 07:45:00 GMT

Introduction

Sometime ago I spent a good amount of time playing with Wez Furlong PHPScript to merge PHP functionalities directly into ASP pages. Although it really can be done, I couldn't feel comfortable enough with the stability of the final application. In fact, the merge between PHP and other ASP languages (VBScript, Javascript, Ruby, Perl and Python) in the same script caused the application to work only in odd requests and not in even ones. Plus it was triggering processing errors in the server. This is incredibly strange and clearly shows that the Active Script port of PHP is flawed. It works fine for .wsc and other command lines things but not plays well with ASP.

Since PHP has a huge community which create really good things, it's interesting to get the benefits of their work in other environments that doesn't run the language. Two notable examples of the good things available in PHP are GeSHi, an incredible code highlighting extension that currently work with over than 130 languages, and Tidy, a nice extension to wrap and indent your XML and HTML. As we can't live without them, I've built the webservices for them both.

Geek Hero Comic at iGoogle

Sun, 10 May 2009 00:44:00 GMT

Today's geekherocomic.com strip came with an interesting news. It's Salvatore Iovene birthday! And the post was about the book his fiancée built with the last entire year strips archive. I really like this guy work, it's a funny part of my day and to celebrate this special occasion I created a gadget to all GeekHeroComic readers to monitor the latest strip directly from iGoogle homepage.

You can add it using:

Happy birthday @siovene! Keep doing this amazing work!

Event-Driven-Programming and lambda function in ASP/VBScript

Thu, 07 May 2009 07:20:00 GMT

Introduction

In this article, I'll speak a little about some issues that I believe are relevant to all modern programmers. However the examples will be written in ASP/VBScript+JScript, so I'll be coherent with the purpose of these articles, which will showcase ASP as an extremely versatile and efficient environment. Here is the list of articles:

ASP, a misinterpreted technology
Event-Driven-Programming and lambda function in ASP/VBScript.
TDD (Test Driven Development) in ASP/VBScript.
Languages: Based on Objects and Object Oriented.
Object Oriented in ASP/VBScript "Hackers way".
"Scripting Components", the ace in the role.
Caching: the concept of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) applied to ASP.

ASP, a misinterpreted technology

Tue, 05 May 2009 05:51:00 GMT

Introduction

After thirteen years of web development, in which the last five I spent almost entirely developing with the .NET platform, I finally saw in Classic ASP the most versatile environment for web development. The main reason for this versatility is, surprisingly, the fact that it is interpreted. It might sound like a joke, mainly because of the whole buzz around the code-behind and the advantages of the compiled code's performance. But, in my opinion, this attribute, summed to multiple languages support, is what guarantees to ASP a distinguish position among the environments for advanced programmers.

Aiming to share my experience and point of view to the whole community, I've decided to create a series of articles, where I'll address key topics that will lead to a greater understanding of the strength hidden in ASP. I've ordered them so that easier topics are discussed first before moving on to the harder ones. Here they are:

ASP, a misinterpreted technology
Event-Driven-Programming and lambda function in ASP/VBScript.
TDD (Test Driven Development) in ASP/VBScript.
Languages: Based on Objects and Object Oriented.
Object Oriented in ASP/VBScript "Hackers way".
"Scripting Components", the ace in the role.
Caching: the concept of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) applied to ASP.

In all subsequent articles, I'll indicate the current stage in bold. I don't intend to stop contributing after the end of the seven subjects. I'll probably attack more problems and more specific topics that illustrate the advantage of using ASP. Well, one step at a time...

Quick Highlight Mode gedit plugin

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 13:17:00 GMT

This plugin provides a faster and easier way to select the current document highlighting mode in gedit. Just press Ctrl+Shift+H, type the language and press Enter.

It's written in Python, so you don't have to compile anything or get any binary. The source is there for inspection and installation.

Logomark and Icons for AXE

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:32:00 GMT

Almost a year has been passed from the first release of AXE and from that to today the project still haven’t it’s own logomark or icons to be used as faveicon. But today, I spent my morning trying to solve this issue. Look, I’m no professional designer, but did my best in this task and liked the result. For the icons I tried to make it compatible with the Tango Icon Guidelines to guarantee a good contrast for both dark and bright backgrounds. I would love to know what you all like or dislike about it. Here’s the final art:

Well, about the new version of AXE, I’m a bit busy working on another project and have no time to polish it. But the enhancements are huge and I hope to have a new version in the next 1 or 2 months.

Reserved Words in ASP

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:46:00 GMT

First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR! Finally, the first entry in 2009! I’ve been working really hard in the latest days, hoping to get a release version of AXE with tons of new features like: Events, XSession, Markdown and Textile parsers and a lot lot more.

This entry is about reserved words in ASP. My current main languages to code ASP are VBScript, Javascript and Python and they are interacting perfectly under the god damn awesome Microsoft CLI. Enough talk, let’s start! The post is about the boring fact that when developing low-level code, you inevitably fall in the task of recreating something important that you feel is missing or is lacking features. You go for it, start a project and everything goes fine until you need to baptize your new child. Spent a little time thinking, you knows the perfect name, try to assign it and Bang! An error happen. This is usually related to reserved words and the devil lives in the ones that you never used and forgot about their existance because they are simply reserved words don’t have any meaning to the compiler! For a quick reference, see below a list of the reserved words of the cited languages. Rare words are in strong.

Deploying and Consuming Web Services based in Classic VBScript ASP 3.0 pages

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:20:00 GMT

Yesterday I received a request to implement some Web Services for a legacy application which is written in Classic ASP. Well, I’ve nothing against using Microsoft .NET to achieve this task, but once the application has a good design and the classes are already there, shouldn’t it be easiest to take the VBScript code and use it to increase my productivity? IMHO the answer is yes.

Well, in summary this article covers the following problem: “How to create a Web Service based in Classic VBScript ASP 3.0 classes using MS SOAP Toolkit 3.0 and Visual Basic 6.0 to work in a IIS 6.0 (Windows 2003) environment?” and the reason why I’m writing this is because I had a little hard time to solve it. I think it mainly happened because the MS SOAP Toolkit was already discontinued when Microsoft released Windows 2003 and the .NET Framework was at it’s climax in the hightech world. So, there isn’t too many material available.

Ah, one more note: I’ve no intention to describe or introduct any of the concepts involved in this task, since you can simply google it an get a lot of results about the definitions. That’s why I’m choosing a very practical way to present this. Ok, that said, let’s begin.