One of the things I like about JUnit 4 is to see anotations replace the naming convention required by earlier versions. I like the declarative approach so much, in fact, that I've extended pyunit (the standard python unit testing framework) with some simple hacks that yield the same syntax. By including the pyunit2.py module, you can now write your test methods like this: @test @expected_exception( NameError ) def a_simple_example_test( self ): #...etc The module's gone up on aspn for posterity. You'll find it here. 511475

I've been planning on updating this blog for some time now, but have been busy with a new job (more on that in a future post). Over the couple of days, I've been looking at some of the various services that are appearing on the web. In the course of playing around with the Google and Yahoo local search APIs, I've noticed that they don't seem to do much outside of the US (not in the UK, at least). This is most irksome, as I was planning on using their features in a couple of sample mashups. Hopefully these services will start to benefit those of us on the other side of the atlantic some time soon!