10 Reasons to Write Unit Tests - Dot Technologies

It’s been bothering me for quite some time not being able to explain the people out there why they need to write unit tests. The most common responses that I got were “this is a waste of time” and “my application has no bugs”. Unfortunately, this overconfidence and cutting corners is hurting the developers (and the industry).

I compiled this short list of why I write unit tests:

Don’t let your customers discover embarassing bugs. Write tests to cover a multitude of scenarios and catch these bugs before they get into production.
Test complex scenarios quickly, without having to manually reproduce them in the application.
By testing often, you don’t break the application as you go. You can’t always know the indirect implications of what you’re writing, especially if you didn’t write the original application.
By testing early, you don’t write unnecessary code but only the strict necessary. This makes the codebase smaller and more maintainable. It also saves on development time.
You do not have to debug the same code twice. Once you have a test to account for a possible bug, you’ll pick up any wrong turns quickly.
You ensure readability. A unit test makes the purpose of your code easier to understand.
You ensure maintainability. Unit-testing forces you to better encapsulate functionality, thus making it easier to maintain and add new features.
Refactor without worries. Run the tests to make sure everything still functions as intended.
Save time on testing. You can test the entire application at the speed of your CPU.
Feel safer. How many times were you afraid to add a new feature or change something in your application’s core? No more!
Bonus: know exactly what is broken. Instead of hunting for an obscure bug, let the tests tell you what’s wrong and why. Example: the application will tell you when you add an item to a cart but the cart still appears empty. It will also tell you what item you tried to add for the cart to break.

Source : http://marxsoftware.blogspot.in

Bluestacks emulator runs Android apps on Windows PCs - Dot Technologies

The software can run the latest Angry Bird Android application on a Windows laptop


Software company Bluestacks is trying to close the gap between Microsoft's Windows and Google's Android OS with its App Player application, which was released in beta today.

App Player is an emulator that allows Android applications to run on Windows 7, Vista, and XP OSes. Users can install the software in Windows and then run about 450,000 Android applications, including Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, the company said.

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Beyond PCs, the App Player could also allow Windows tablets such as Hewlett-Packard's Slate 2 and Dell's Latitude ST to run Android applications. Bluestacks made headlines at last year's Computex trade show in Taipei when Advanced Micro Devices showed off an x86 tablet with Android running on top of the Windows 7 software stack. Android applications are mostly written for the ARM instruction set, but the x86 tablet was able to switch between Android and Windows without any problems.

The emulator has new Layercake technology, which exploits hardware accelerators to improve the performance of Android games in Windows. The layer was not included in the Bluestacks alpha version. Android applications typically use hardware accelerators found in ARM's Mali, Nvidia's Tegra, and Imagination Technologies' PowerVR graphics cores, but Layercake can take advantage of hardware accelerators found in x86 chips from companies like AMD.

The Bluestacks app is 3.6MB and can be downloaded from the company's website. The software installed without any issues on Windows XP, and on start provided the option to download software from Google's Android application market. Angry Bird Space, the latest iteration of the game, was released last week and ran on the PC through Bluestacks. However, resizing the window to full-screen mode required restarting the Angry Birds application.

The software also offered the option to sync apps and contacts with an Android device.

Article Source : http://www.infoworld.com

Does Having Good Content on Your Site Really Matter? - DotTechnologies.net

When it comes to building a business website, there are a lot of different elements that you have to think about. The content that you put on your site is going to be a lot more important than you might realize. People talk about content and whether it really counts, and the fact of the matter is that if you don't have solid information on your site, you're wasting your time with the investment in designing and creating a website in the first place. Content is everything and you have to make sure that you utilize it to create a site that is informative, engaging, and useful to your audience to keep them coming back for more.

The content that goes on your website will either make or break your success, in most cases. There are many different elements that your content needs to provide to your audience. In order to make the best use of your business website, your content should be:

-SEO-friendly. Make sure that you're using keywords so that search engines are able to follow and pick up on your website to rank it in search results. Just remember to follow rules for keyword usage and density so that you don't overdo it. It's better to have a keyword about once or twice for every 100 words than to stuff it in as much as you can.

-Brief. People are looking for quick, concise information. If your content is not to-the-point and easy to follow, your audience isn't going to stick around very long. Make sure that you get the facts out, get your point across, and be done with it.

-Informative. People need to know what you have to offer or why they are at your site. Provide them with all of the facts and information that they need to know about your business. Give them the chance to learn about your business, what you do, and how it can benefit them. This is what people want to know.

-Engaging. If you're not capable of producing simple, clean, engaging content on your own, you should hire someone to do the work. You content has to get people's attention and give them a reason to invest in your business, no matter what you are selling.

-Friendly. The last thing that people want online is to visit a website where they feel like they're being talked down to. Therefore, you have to make sure that your content is friendly and simple, not overly professional and 'better than thou' in its tone and style.

Content is king in the internet world, and your website is not going to be able to succeed without it. By taking the time to create useful, engaging content, you can rest assured that your audience will be much more likely to buy whatever you're selling and see your business in a professional light. 

Source: http://www.visualscope.com

Most Creative 404 HTTP Response Ever? - DotTechnologies

The HTTP 404 Status Code is one of the HTTP status codes that all web developers and nearly all web users are all too familiar with. It is an HTTP response indicating that an HTTP request was received by the intended server, but that the exact resource specified in the request URI cannot be found on the server. In the early days of the World Wide Web, it seemed like many sites did not bother doing anything in particular about this page. This meant that a pretty useless and nearly blank page would show up in the user's browser. Some browsers, such as Internet Explorer, attempted to provide more general details in a "user friendly" format.

These browser attempts at providing more details about the cause of a 404 response status were still not very helpful because there is no good general way to handle a 404 error response. Instead, it is preferable for a site to provides its own custom 404 response page. The advantages of a custom 404 are discussed in more detail in Importance of Custom 404 Error Pages.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the percentage of sites providing a custom 404 error response. This is especially true for sites that want to do whatever that can to retain the user's business and/or traffic to their site. These sites attempt to do their best to provide a search or suggestions for what the user can do next. Some sites don't try to fix the situation, but instead automatically redirect to the site's main page. Other sites perform a combination, providing a search box and acknowledgement of an unfound page for a few seconds and then automatically redirecting to their main page.

After seeing the reference on reddit Programming to Github's Star Wars Themed 404 Page, I wondered if there are any 404 error responses more clever than this one. The Github 404 page may not be the best at helping the user find what he or she was looking for, but it is funny and does provide links to other actions that might be taken.

I tried some intentionally unavailable URIs on some of my most-accessed sites to see how their 404 responses are handled. In the rest of this post, I look briefly at some of them and analyze the value each provides. Mostly though, I was simply looking for the most interesting 404 page I could find and so far I haven't found any more funny than Github's.

http://marxsoftware.blogspot.in