At the heart of the JDK are object I/O and Serialization capabilities, packaged into a comprehensive library for managing the life cycle of simple objects. Although the approach taken by this particular base library has to some extent been superseded by other approaches, it remains an important and influential technical approach, that can be usefully applied in simpler standalone applications.

Test Driven Development has been among the most influential approaches in recent software engineering history. Here we look at its origins, principles and some of the important benefits of the approach.

The essential elements of TDD are fairly easy to grasp. The support libraries (xUnit) are relatively straightforward, and we can expect our IDE to provide direct assistance to using these libraries. Here we look at the facilities Eclipse provides to the JUnit library.

Equip Pacemaker with JUnit libraries and then introduce a range of tests to verify essential features. Correct issues that arise as a result of the tests, becoming familiar with the fail/pass/refactor/pass cycle. Review the outstanding command set of the application. We will use JUnit 4 in this lab.