Today all of the London apprentices (and two from Chicago) got an introduction into Java by Mike Jansen.

Since I used Java for some time already it wasn’t all new to me – even though it’s been some years since then.

The application we’re working on is a small example project by 8th Light called “Ledjer”. In it a Ledger class is used to store payments, deposits and some more things. Since it’s used as an example the intention is not to have a 100% accurate representation of a ledger (accounting wise), but to get used to Java on the one hand, and on the other to familiarise ourselves with FitNesse as an acceptance testing tool.

Overall it’s fun, and Java skills wise not too challenging yet. But FitNesse does some interesting things to automatically connect the FIT tables with Java code/fixtures. Often I find myself to write class and method names by try and error until FitNesse is pleased to use the fixture. But once you’ve seen and realised how everything connects together I begins to make sense.

Tomorrow we have our second meeting with Mike and the other apprentices to proceed with the exercises.