Slightly is a Java Servlet that process request for HTML templates which are expected to contain
expressions that can be later evaluated and rendered as valid HTML.
This project is developed as a coding exercise to apply for the role of Software Engineer at
NetCentric.
###IMPLEMENTATION
In order to solve the problem proposed in the coding exercise, I implemented a Java Servlet that's
capable of process the requested HTML template and evaluate the expressions expected to be found
inside it. On a high level, these are the steps followed to process the template:
- Load the requested HTML document based on the request path.
- Evaluate Javascript code in the specified HTML document. The servlet will only evaluate code
contained inside a "script" tag with the "type" attribute set to "server/javascript".
- Evaluate data-if expressions using the Javascript engine
- Evaluate data-for-x expressions using the Javascript engine
- Evaluate $-expressions
- Print out the response
If there's any error in between any of these steps, the servlet will handle it and print out the problem as response. For more details about the implementation, please take a look to the documentation of the HTLProcessor class.
###USING THE APPLICATION
- Clone this repository (or download the zip artifact)
- Open a command line and move to the Slightly folder
- Execute the command mvn jetty:run
- The application should be available at http://localhost:8080
Note: Before start using the application, you'll need to have Apache Maven properly installed and configured in your environment.
Quality Assurance is an important part on any software development process, this is why I decided to make it part of this project. The QA in this project is verified with three mechanisms:
In order to test the application behavior, I designed two additional templates besides the base case provided with the problem description.
The base case template is located at _src/main/webapp/index.html_. This template loads the Person object corresponding to the given id. It displays the name of the person, the name of the person's spouse (only if the person is married) and a list of the person children.
**Expected Path:** http://localhost:8080/index.html?id=_personId_
Where: _personId_ is an integer identifying the requested person
The custom template to load a Person is located at _src/main/webapp/tests/test1.html_. This template loads the Person object corresponding to the given id. It displays the name of the person, the name of the person's spouse and the list of the person's children. The main difference between this template and the previous one is that this one ONLY displays the spouse and list of children IF the person is married. Otherwise, only the person's name will be displayed (data-for-x inside data-if).
**Expected Path:** http://localhost:8080/tests/test1.html?id=_personId_
Where: _personId_ is an integer identifying the requested person
The template to load Books is located at _src/main/webapp/tests/test2.html_. This template creates a Book object using the data provided by the user. It displays the book's title, author and associated genres. The book's publication year is ONLY displayed IF the book was published after 1990.
**Expected Path:** http://localhost:8080/tests/test2.html?name=_name_&&author=_author_&&year=_year_
Where: _name_ is the book's name, _author_ is the book's author and _year_ is the book's publication year. The genres _Genre0, Genre1, Genre2_ will be associated by default.
The unit test are a very good (and broadly used) tool to ensure the code is working as expected and to make sure that further changes won't break its expected functionality.
- In this project, the test cases are located at src/test/java directory.
- In order to execute them you can use the command: mvn clean test
The unit tests were written using JUnit, Mockito and PowerMock.
Finally, automated tests are very useful to ensure the proper behavior of the application. For this project I wrote several test scenarios using the templates described in the Manual Testing section.
- Test Scenarios: src/test/resources/biz/netcentric/bdd/TestTemplates.feature
- Step Definitions: src/test/java/biz/netcentric/bdd/SlightlyStepDef.java
In order to execute the automated tests cases you need to follow these steps:
- Execute the command mvn jetty:run in order to start the application
- In a separate console, execute the command: mvn test -Dtest=biz.netcentric.bdd.BDDRunner
The automated test cases were created using Cucumber, Selenium and Mozzila Firefox version 30.0.
Note: Due to changes in Selenium library, the automated tests might not work properly in a
different version of Firefox.
For the development of this project, I used the following tools and libraries:
| TOOL | VERSION | USAGE |
|---|---|---|
| Maven | 3.3.9 | Dependency Management System |
| Jetty | 9.4.0 | Servlet Engine |
| JSoup | 1.10.2 | DOM Management Library |
| Rhino | 1.7.7.1 | JavaScript Engine |
| Apache Common-lang | 3.5 | Utilities Library |
| JUnit | 4.12 | Java Unit Tests |
| Mockito | 1.10.19 | Mock objects for testing |
| PowerMock | 1.6.6 | Mocks for static methods |
| Selenium | 2.53.1 | Execution of automated tests |
| Cucumber | 1.2.5 | Step definitions for the automated tests |
| Firefox | 30.0 | Execution of automated tests |
| IntelliJ IDEA | 2016.3.4 | IDE |
| Git | 2.9.0 | Version Control System |
| Source Tree | 1.9.10.0 | UI for Git |
| GitHub | Source Repository |
This project can be found at https://github.com/jhoanmanuelms/slightly