Jonathan Kohl talks at length about the good and bad of the XP and Agile notions of software testing. Jonathan is a well known writer on software testing issues and has worked extensively as a tester on conventional software projects as well as scrum and extreme programming (XP) teams. He also shares his views on Ruby and the Ruby based Watir testing tool.

Scripting / agile / dynamic languages for Java have been around for some time. However they seem to be getting more attention lately, because of the growing popularity of languages like Ruby and frameworks like Ruby On Rails. So the Java community looks hungry for an alternative to Ruby On Rails and a scripting language that it can easily adopt using Java knowledge. Enter Groovy and Grails.

In this interview, we speak to Guillaume Laforge, the project manager for Groovy and the initiator of Grails. Guillaume sounds very excited about the features of the Groovy language and he also feels that Grails which was originally "Groovy On Rails" is the ROR alternative for Java that the community has been looking for.

Do share your thoughts on scripting and groovy using the comments form on the last page of this interview.

If there's one thing the Java community has an addiction for, it's frameworks. There are 100s of Java frameworks and surprisingly there's even a passionate community of users behind many. However only a handful of frameworks have made it big. Struts and WebWork figure in that list.

The two frameworks recently announced their plans to merge into Struts Ti / Struts Action Framework 2.0, which has resulted in some anxiety and uncertainty in both communitites.

In this interview we speak to Patrick Lightbody, project lead for WebWork and now a committer at Apache Struts. He answers several WebWork + Struts queries and also talks about Ajax frameworks and Ajax support in WebWork. The interview concludes with Patrick's thoughts on Ruby on Rails and its relevance to the Java community.

Java enthusiasts today seems to have a love-hate relationship with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. While there are some who feel it's over hyped, there are others who feel that Rails is the coolest web application development technology of our times. So who better to talk about Ruby on Rails and Java than the creator of ROR, David Heinemeier Hansson.

In this interview with Satish Talim, David talks about the growth of Rails and its features. He also tells us why Rails is relevant to Java developers and something Java developers need to look at right away.