As part of a new hobby/freelance project, I’ve been trying out the Citrus Framework, an integration test framework written in Java for SOA application. It’s quite neat and interesting. Right now, I’m using it mostly for testing sequences of HTTP GET and POST requests, and it works pretty nicely so far, although I did have to go into the source code and hack in handling for GET requests and variable URLs since those weren’t yet implemented. That was fun though and exposed me to some design patterns live in action in someone else’s code, which is pretty cool (I don’t see too much of this as a student writing my own code most of the time). Perhaps with more time and effort, I can clean up my changes and submit them to the framework developer(s) and actually be a part of open source software! That would be pretty exciting.
For the last week, working through this project, I’ve re-learned and learned quite a lot about HTTP requests, Ant, DTD/XSD, and XPath, and I feel much more comfortable dealing with those now than I did a week ago. It’s a good feeling to have learned and done something new that’s kind of on the cutting edge of things, and to have fun doing so too! Ah, I sound so corny. Anyway, I can’t wait to get more involved with the company that this project is for and delve into some code that has a lot of potential and fun-value. I’m just waiting on approval from the developers now, but so far things look good. Wish me luck! =)