In a previous blog I wrote how to make an API. See here.
Now we'll make a client to use that API. This can be done with spray-client. First we add dependencies for spray-client and spray-json:

apply plugin: 'scala'

version = '1.0'

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    compile group: 'org.scala-lang', name: 'scala-library', version: '2.11.6'
    compile group: 'com.typesafe.akka', name: 'akka-actor_2.11', version: '2.3.9'
    compile group: 'com.typesafe.akka', name: 'akka-remote_2.11', version: '2.3.9'
    testCompile group: 'org.scalatest', name: 'scalatest_2.11', version: '2.2.4'
    compile group: 'io.spray', name: 'spray-http_2.11', version: '1.3.3'
    compile group: 'io.spray', name: 'spray-httpx_2.11', version: '1.3.3'
    compile group: 'io.spray', name: 'spray-json_2.11', version: '1.3.1'
    compile group: 'io.spray', name: 'spray-client_2.11', version: '1.3.3'
}

Continue reading →

Tuesday we had our second ever "Vrolijke Framboos" (Dutch for Happy Raspberry) Java code challenge at JDriven and it was a blast! This year’s challenge was to create a REST service client that would play a number guessing game with the server. After setting up a session you would guess a number and the server would respond with either "lower", "higher" or "bingo". The goal was to guess as many numbers in the two minutes you’d be given. Given the name of the challenge you can probably guess that the target platform would be a Raspberry Pi!

It was an incredible and fun experience and in this post I want to explain how I approached the challenge and how my solution ended up in the second place, making me just miss the opportunity to take home the trophy and a new Raspberry.

Continue reading →

As we all know Javascript gives us the awesome ability to create functions inside functions. This allows us to create private functions which support the main function. It is also something we do often when creating object functions. This structure is used by angular for the creation of providers and directives alike. Every once in a while I personally come to a point where I would like to test these private functions. This is especially true for use cases in Angular such as directives.I'd like to be able to run unit tests for a directive's private functions, but I'd like to do this without having to make them public. The way I do this is by using a concept called reflection. This process actually described by Bob Gravelle in his post 'Accessing Private functions in Javascript' actually exposes the private functions by using the toString method of a function. Before I go into specifics let me say that this article should only be used as an approach  for unit testing. There is a good reason for keeping private functions private and using this concept for application code may very well introduce interesting side effects. That being said let's go into details. In order for us to use this concept we'll need to make some slight changes to our directive. Normally we would declare our Directive Definition Object (DDO) and directly return it. As below:

return {
  restrict: 'E'
  ...
}

Continue reading →