Using JConsole

I updated my eclipse to version 3.2.2, lucky me did not remove the previous version just yet, and run into a crashing system that seems to run out of memory. So I decided to connect jconsole to eclipse to view its memory consumption.
To do so I needed to start eclipse using JDK 5, with the system property -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.
Now JConsole is able to connect to the eclipse process and show its memory consumption.

After playing a while with eclipse the OOM exception hapened again, but saidly JConsole has lost its connection, so nothing to see what/.where had happened.

The story continues...

Mocking a base class

The next problem that arose when trying to unit test my portlet, is that my portlet implementation calls some methods of its base class, javax.portlet.GenericPortlet. How can these method calls be mocked?

In the unit test implementation an inner class is defined that extends the class under test.
This inner class can then mock any base class method called from the class under test:

public class MyPortletTest extends TestCase {

  private PortletContext portletContext = EasyMock.createMock(PortletContext.class);

  protected void setUp() throws Exception {
     super.setUp();

     // Use the inner class derived from the actual CUT that provides
     // overrides for the base class methods.
     testObject = new TestObject();
  }

  // Additional methods removed for clarity...

  /**
   * Need to extend the portlet under test for overriding base class methods.
   */
  private class TestObject extends MetaInfoPortlet {

     /**
      * A mock needs to be returned
      */
     @Override
     public PortletContext getPortletContext() {
        return portletContext;
     }
  }
}

Using this scheme one can override any of the base classes methods used in the class under test (CUT), and provide a mock based implementation.