26.StackStripesExtension

The distribution is available

Here

This was a simple exercise in learning the technology that will be used in later projects.

Installing Tomcat
I found this rather easy. I simply downloaded it, unzipped it, read some of the documentation to make sure I had everything correct, and ran it. I was able to connect to http://localhost:8080 right away without any problems.

Installing Stripes
Another rather easy task, as it simply involved downloading files and placing them in correct directories. After placing the stripes-examples.war file in the webapps directory, I was able to connect to http://localhost:8080/stripes-examples without any problems.

Installing StackStripes
Now this task was a bit more tricky. I was able to get it downloaded and deployed on Tomcat rather quickly, but came across some problems with getting all of the build.xml files to work correctly. I would always get a fail on verify because emma would not run properly. However, after reading the discussion boards about emma, I simply ran junit first and ran tomcat from the stackstripes project directory. After doing this, everything worked fine.

Improving coverage
When I first looked at the TestActionBean.java file, I was rather confused. It seemed that it was quite complicated to run tests on the server side of the project. However, after reading some more documentation and playing around with some of the code, I managed to get a good grasp on it. It appeared that the two methods that were not tested were the pop method in StackActionBean and the iterator in StackModel. I added test for these two methods and a error check for popping an empty stack to achieve 100% coverage in all areas.

The Double It button
It was surprisingly easy to create the "Double It" button and functionality. I did, however, have one strange problem with concurrency. There are some concurrency issues when iterating over a stack and pushing new elements on it at the same time. To overcome this, my doubleIt method first copies the entire stack to a temporary location then pushes the new members onto the original stack. This prevents concurrency problems with the iterator.
I also added one additional test of this method to keep emma coverage at 100%.

Conclusions
Overall this was a pretty straightforward task that allowed me to learn some of the technology we will need in the future. I like the simplicity of Stripes and the ease of adding new components. I think I am now ready to do more complex work with this technology.