New books: Beautiful Testing, Core Data, RESTful Java with JAX-RS

Beautiful Testing offers 23 essays from 27 leading testers and developers that illustrate the qualities and techniques that make testing an art. Through personal anecdotes, you’ll learn how each of these professionals developed beautiful ways of testing a wide range of products–valuable knowledge that you can apply to your own projects.

Here’s a sample of what you’ll find inside:

• Microsoft’s Alan Page knows a lot about large-scale test automation, and shares some of his secrets on how to make it beautiful
• Scott Barber explains why performance testing needs to be a collaborative process, rather than simply an exercise in measuring speed
• Karen Johnson describes how her professional experience intersected her personal life while testing medical software
• Rex Black reveals how satisfying stakeholders for 25 years is a beautiful thing
• Mathematician John D. Cook applies a classic definition of beauty, based on complexity and unity, to testing random number generators.

Whether you are developing for Mac OS X or the iPhone, at some point your Cocoa application is probably going to need to save data and read it back later. You could struggle with the raw SQLite database included on the iPhone, generate cumbersome XML, or create your own binary format from scratch. Or, you can save time and energy by taking advantage of Apple’s Core Data framework instead.

In Core Data: Apple’s API for Persisting Data on Mac OS X, author Marcus Zarra says, “If you plan on writing an application that saves data to disk, then you should be taking a very long look at Core Data. Whether you are focusing on the desktop or the iPhone, Core Data is the most efficient solution to data persistence.”

Core Data makes it easy for you to work with object graphs and to persist data–but there are plenty of pitfalls and issues to watch out for. This book shows you everything you need from versioning to integrating with Quick Look, Sync Services, and Spotlight. You’ll see how to boost performance and work in multithreaded applications, and work with Core Data on both the desktop and the iPhone.

Learn how to design and develop distributed web services in Java using RESTful architectural principals and the JAX-RS specification in Java EE 6. With RESTful Java with JAX-RS by Bill Burke, you’ll focus on implementation rather than theory, and discover why the RESTful method is far better than technologies like CORBA and SOAP.

It’s easy to get started with services based on the REST architecture. RESTful Java with JAX-RS includes a technical guide that explains REST and JAX-RS, how they work, and when to use them. With the RESTEasy workbook that follows, you get step-by-step instructions for installing, configuring, and running several working JAX-RS examples using the JBoss RESTEasy implementation of JAX-RS.

• Work on the design of a distributed RESTful interface, and develop it in Java as a JAX-RS service
• Dispatch HTTP requests in JAX-RS, and learn how to extract information from them
• Deploy your web services within Java Enterprise Edition using the Application class, Default Component Model, EJB Integration, Spring Integration, and JPA
• Explore several options for securing your web services
• Learn how to implement RESTful design patterns using JAX-RS
• Write RESTful clients in Java using libraries and frameworks such as java.net.URL, Apache HTTP Client, and RESTEasy Proxy.