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Java != JVM

Java != JVM

Posted Mar 15, 2004 7:39 UTC (Mon) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942)
In reply to: Java != JVM by oak
Parent article: Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development? (O'ReillyNet)

> Or are you claiming that with statically typed langauges testing is not needed? :-)

In a statically typed language you need less test suits since the compiler can do type checking.

Here is an example when test suite is a hard to achive option.

At work I have to maintain a driver of html pages so business data can be submitted autonatically against a web site that useses extremely complex JavaScript and ActiveX mixture in place of vanilla HTML forms. The driver uses a browser library to maintain the state of dynamic DOM and previosly used JavaScript to stuff the DOM with business data.

When the site changes it is critical to update the driver ASAP. Fortunately it is not that hard since the browser library continue to work and it is a matter of finding proper places in the new DOM for the data. Unfortunately any delay in that means that someone has to spend time enetering data manually into MSIE. So you simply can not afford time to create test suits which may not be even feasible since effectively you need a copy of the web site to test properly.

I stopped using JavaScript in the driver when after a couple of trivial mistypes that caused submittion of wrong data. The bug would be caught trivially by the compiler in a static language and now the driver is all in Java.


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