Real-World Software Development

Chapter 6. Twootr

The Challenge

Joe was an excited young chap, keen to tell me all about his new startup idea. He was on a mission to help people communicate better and faster. He enjoyed blogging but wondered about how to get people to blog more frequently in smaller amounts. He was calling it micro-blogging. The big idea was that if you restricted the size of the messages to 140 characters that people would post little and often rather than in big messages.

We asked Joe if he felt that this restriction would encourage people to just post short, pithy statements that didn’t really mean anything. He said “Yolo!” We asked Joe how he was going to make money. He said “Yolo!” We asked Joe what he planned to call the product. He said “Twootr!” We thought it sounded like a cool and original idea, so we decided to help him build his product.

The Goal

In this chapter you will learn about the big picture of putting a software application together. A lot of the previous apps in this book were smaller examples—batch jobs that would run on the command line. Twootr is a server-side Java application, similar to the kind of application that most Java developers write.

In this chapter you’ll have the opportunity to learn about a number of different skills:

• How to take a big picture description and break it down into different architectural concerns

• How to use test doubles to isolate and test interactions from different components within your codebase

• How to think outside-in—to go from ...