How long does it take for the Google Play Store to publish my app in beta?

Your mileage may vary, but it shouldn’t take significantly longer than a couple of hours. If you’re not too unlucky, it should probably take just one hour, both when you’re publishing an app for the first time, and when you’re releasing an update for an existing app.

If it’s taking significantly longer than that (I’m talking more than one day here), you may have been fooled by Google’s peculiar requirements for deployments.

This fooled me twice (so I guess, shame on me).

When you publish an app for the first time, you need to create a Google Group or a Google+ community for testers before the link to your app becomes available. If you try to access the link (even using your own Google account) without being a member of the configured group/community, you’re greeted with a 404 page.

Last time I published an app though, setting an existing Google Group for testers (one that I had configured for a different app) didn’t seem to work. When I created a new Community on Google+, it worked right away. I don’t know if I was just unlucky or if you need a dedicated Google Group for every app, but if you still get a 404 after setting up the Google Group, just try with Google+.

After you’ve become a tester for the app (by visiting your app’s page on the Play Store) it usually takes another hour or so before the APK becomes available for download.

Eclipse freezes after installing LUA development tools plugin

This was an interesting one, but surprisingly very easy to solve.

After installing the LUA tools as a plugin, Eclipse mysteriously stopped working: what happened was, I would launch Eclipse from a shortcut (I’m using Docky in Ubuntu 13.04, but as it turns out, this is irrelevant), it would show me a LUA development tools splash screen (weird), then the Eclipse workbench… and stop there.

I went on to launch Eclipse from the command line to see what was going on and… I discovered that somehow the eclipse binary had been swapped with another one called LuaDevelopmentTools. Funny thing was, the latter was actually the original eclipse binary. Also, eclipse.ini had been renamed to LuaDevelopmentTools.ini.

Solution:

cd /path/to/eclipse/install/folder
mv eclipse eclipse.bak
mv LuaDevelopmentTools eclipse
mv LuaDevelopmentTools.ini eclipse.ini
mv eclipse.back LuaDevelopmentTools

restarted from the launcher, everything works.

Run JUnit tests in order

JUnit runs test methods in whatever order it wants, which is generally fine as long as all your test methods are independent of each other. This, though, may not be the case when you’re writing integration tests, where you could have a sequence of operations like

login(credentials);
requestProject("foo");
createNewItem("bar");
logout();

in a situation like this, you always want testLogout() to run after testLogin(), and createNewItem() to run after requestProject()!

Yes, you could group everything in a single test method, but it may become huge and very hard to maintain.

Quite surprisingly, JUnit doesn’t have a built-in solution for this. You can run test methods sorted by name using the @FixMethodOrder(MethodSorters.NAME_ASCENDING) tag, but then you need to artificially name your methods so that they appear in the order you want.

I found some alternative solutions in this stackoverflow question, but they require annotating your methods with tags to specify the order in which you want them to run. What I’d like them to do is just run in the same order as they appear in the source code for the test class. Among the answers, I just found this blog post that achieves the same result as I did, only it looks somewhat more complicated (it involves writing/including several classes).

My solution is fairly simple, but there’s 2 warnings:

  1. it uses Javassist, so if you don’t want to add libraries, there’s that
  2. it only works as long as you don’t have test classes that extend other test classes, and you don’t override all @Test-annotated methods in the subclass (I’ve never done that, but I guess as tests get complicated, you may have that); this can be fixed quite easily though, you just need to add the logic for what should come first according to your needs

On with the code!

You can grab the source straight from this pastebin, or copy/paste it from here (I added the MIT License, I think it should be the most permissive.. my intent is to say “do whatever the heck you want with this code”)

/*
 * Copyright (C) <2014> <Michele Bonazza>
 * 
 * 
 * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
 * of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
 * in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
 * to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
 * copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
 * furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
 * 
 * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
 * all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
 * 
 * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
 * IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
 * FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
 * AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
 * LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
 * OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
 * SOFTWARE.
 */

/**
 * A test runner that runs tests according to their position in the source file
 * of the test class.
 * 
 * @author Michele Bonazza
 */
public class OrderedTestRunner extends BlockJUnit4ClassRunner {

    /**
     * Creates a new runner
     * 
     * @param clazz
     *            the class being tested
     * @throws InitializationError
     *             if something goes wrong
     */
    public OrderedTestRunner(Class<?> clazz) throws InitializationError {
        super(clazz);
    }

    /*
     * (non-Javadoc)
     * 
     * @see org.junit.runners.BlockJUnit4ClassRunner#computeTestMethods()
     */
    @Override
    protected List<FrameworkMethod> computeTestMethods() {
        // get all methods to be tested
        List<FrameworkMethod> toSort = super.computeTestMethods();

        if (toSort.isEmpty())
            return toSort;

        // a map containing <line_number, method>
        final Map<Integer, FrameworkMethod> testMethods = new TreeMap<>();

        // check that all methods here are declared in the same class, we don't
        // deal with test methods from superclasses that haven't been overridden
        Class<?> clazz = getDeclaringClass(toSort);
        if (clazz == null) {
            // fail explicitly
            System.err
                    .println("OrderedTestRunner can only run test classes that"
                            + " don't have test methods inherited from superclasses");
            return Collections.emptyList();
        }

        // use Javassist to figure out line numbers for methods
        ClassPool pool = ClassPool.getDefault();
        try {
            CtClass cc = pool.get(clazz.getName());
            // all methods in toSort are declared in the same class, we checked
            for (FrameworkMethod m : toSort) {
                String methodName = m.getName();
                CtMethod method = cc.getDeclaredMethod(methodName);
                testMethods.put(method.getMethodInfo().getLineNumber(0), m);
            }
        } catch (NotFoundException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        return new ArrayList<>(testMethods.values());
    }

    private Class<?> getDeclaringClass(List<FrameworkMethod> methods) {
        // methods can't be empty, it's been checked
        Class<?> clazz = methods.get(0).getMethod().getDeclaringClass();

        for (int i = 1; i < methods.size(); i++) {
            if (!methods.get(i).getMethod().getDeclaringClass().equals(clazz)) {
                // they must be all in the same class
                return null;
            }
        }

        return clazz;
    }
}

to use this, you need to add Javassist to your classpath; if you have a Maven project, it’s incredibly easy to do so, just add this to your POM:

<dependency>
  <groupId>javassist</groupId>
  <artifactId>javassist</artifactId>
  <version>3.12.1.GA</version>
</dependency>

and annotate your JUnit test class with @RunWith(OrderedTestRunner.class), like this:

import wherever.you.put.OrderedTestRunner;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;

@RunWith(OrderedTestRunner.class)
public class MyTestClass {

    @Test
    public void testZero() {
        System.out.println("test zero run");
    }

    @Test
    public void testOne() {
        System.out.println("test one run");
    }
}

That’s it!

About warning 2. above, in case you have something like MyTestClass extends BaseTestClass and you have methods annotated with @Test in BaseTestClass that aren’t overridden by MyTestClass, OrderedTestRunner will just fail printing the message you can see at line 50 above on System.err. I did this because I don’t think there’s a well-defined order in that case (should all methods from the super class run first? Should that go all the way up in the class hierarchy?), so you can adjust it to fit your particular needs.

Create a list of movies to watch with Python and Urlist

I usually like to keep lists of movies to watch, books to read, games to play on Google Keep, mainly because it comes with a widget that looks nice on my phone. Its sharing capabilities though are, well, nonexistent. Yes, you can email a list with a bullet point for each entry but it ends there.

Since I wanted to share a list of movies to watch with my wife, I resorted to Urlist. It’s a neat, straight-to-the-point tool that’s good for sharing links with friends, collaborators, anybody.

I wish they had an API available, so that this post could have been about a tool that automatically creates lists for you (heck, I could even write a simple chrome extension!), but so far there’s none.

Our list is going to have, for every entry, the vote that the movie got on IMDB, a brief summary of its plot and cast. If any of them attracts your SO’s attention, (s)he can just click to see further info about the movie 🙂

The script requires BeautifulSoup and Requests, 2 awesome libraries to scrape the web.

To install them, you can use either pip:

sudo pip install beautifulsoup4 requests

or easy_install:

sudo easy_install beautifulsoup4 requests

Create the list on Urlist, launch the script:

python scrape_IMDB.py

and for every movie you want to add:

  1. search it on IMDB
  2. copy the URL
  3. paste the URL on Urlist to add an entry
  4. paste the URL on the console where the script is running
  5. copy the output of the script
  6. back to Urlist, hit edit and paste what you copied

Here’s the script (you can download it from pastebin):

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

done = False

while not done:
  try:
    url = raw_input("IMDB URL: ")

    # get the IMDB page
    r = requests.get(url)
    data = r.text

    # and parse it with BeautifulSoup
    soup = BeautifulSoup(data)

    # the td containing what we're looking for
    td = soup.find('td', {'id': 'overview-top'})
    rating = td.find('div', {'class': 'star-box-giga-star'}).string
    plot = td.find('p', {'itemprop': 'description'}).string
    # the div containing the main actors in the cast
    actors = td.find('div', {'itemprop': 'actors'})
    stars = ', '.join([actor.string for actor in actors.find_all('span', {'class': 'itemprop', 'itemprop': 'name'})])

    print '*%s* - %s. %s' % (rating.strip(), stars, plot)
  except KeyboardInterrupt:
    done = True
print
print 'bye!'

It’s super simple! It gets the page, finds the HTML source for what we’re looking for, and prints it out as formatted text that’s good for Urlist.

The way you find items with BeautifulSoup is relatively similar to what you do with jQuery: you look for elements in the DOM that contain what you’re looking for (to find what they are, just use your browser’s inspector… on Chrome, right click on the text and choose “Inspect element…” to see where it is in the DOM), and manipulate them as strings or arrays of strings.

Easy enough!