Comments on: Peer Review: You Have Not Because You Ask Not (Requests & Responses)

By: Brandon Savage

Brandon Savage — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:35:43 +0000

Diogo, the reason that I’m returning ExceptionResponse is because I’m assuming that we want to display some sort of message to the end user. I’m also assuming that this class is part of a controller, which will send its output to a response formatter.

Remember that an unhanded exception will stop the processing of an application. This would result in a white screen of death. Instead, I’d want to log the exception and display something to the user.

There are additional ways to handle the exceptions; you could wrap the tweet() method call in a try-catch block in another class, etc. There’s no one single “right” way to do it in this case.

Good question!

By: Diogo

Diogo — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:30:56 +0000

Why exactly are you returning ExceptionResponse instead of just throwing an exception?

By: Zilvinas

Zilvinas — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:26:26 +0000

*functional => integration

By: Zilvinas

Zilvinas — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:23:46 +0000

Fixing up databases for unit tests is slow. You want your tests to execute in 2 secs so you could run them every time you press ctrl+s and you may have hundreds of those tests. And worse you may have queries that are not compatible with sqlite like MySQL date/time functions. And worse you would be testing logging and tweeting and if your test fails for logging you are not exactly sure what’s not working – logging or tweeting. Meaning it’s no longer a unit test and rather a functional test.

Wouldn’t say propel is doing a great job with singletons :)

By: Brandon Savage

Brandon Savage — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:02:17 +0000

I would normally have injected all dependent objects, but in this case the way Propel (the ORM I’m using) works it makes use of static methods. I could potentially move the business logic into the model, but as written it would be an impossible task to replace the static methods I’m using with dynamic ones that could be mocked out.

That said, you can have a custom configuration, so theoretically I could create a SQLite database in memory and test using that. Propel uses a Singleton, for better or worse, making a memory-based database perfect for testing.

By: Zilvinas

Zilvinas — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:30:38 +0000

You’re creating a TwitterLog instance every time you log something. TwitterLog should be injected to improve testability. TwitterLog should be mocked out to allow the class to be tested in isolation from other components.