The Difference Between Mocks and Stubs

jason — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:59:59 +0000

Found this Fowler article pretty insightful when thinking about the difference between mocks and stubs. New to the mocking scene, I didn’t understand the difference at first, but the latter part of the portion I have linked to states that Mocks are used to validate behavior whilst Stubs are used to validate state . Looking at the two example tests, the difference between the two types of tests becomes readily apparent. One tests the certain methods fired, and the other tests that properties of an object contain the values that we thought they should be.

http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html#TheDifferenceBetweenMocksAndStubs

Actionscript Locally Persistent Data Object

jason — Sat, 30 May 2009 18:09:28 +0000

Flash has an easy way to save locally persistent data directly from Actionscript. Using the SharedObject Class, one can define many data points within the same object and use them like you would “cookies”.

//Declare a cookie name
var cookieName:String = "cookieExample";
 
//Create an object to store cookie data
var cookie:SharedObject = SharedObject.getLocal(cookieName);
 
//If the data we are looking for doesn't exist (and it truly doesn't exist, it's just not 0)
if(!cookie.data.firstPageToShow && cookie.data.firstPageToShow!=0){
 
	//initiate the data point
	cookie.data.firstPageToShow = 0;
 
}else{
 
	//increment the data point
	cookie.data.firstPageToShow += 1;
}

After this code runs, if the user has visited the site before, they will be taken to the page after they last left, or if they haven’t visited the site yet, the user will be taken to the 0th page.

In the real world, this code has been used to ensure that users visiting a site with a rotating campaign, saw each image and caption of the campaign on subsequent visits.

D2Coding » Code

The Difference Between Mocks and Stubs

Actionscript Locally Persistent Data Object