teaching

The basic problem, as illustrated by this somewhat aged Jetty pathSpec documentation, is that "/" is treated as "/*" when giving a servlet path spec. Thus, if you want to have a servlet as "front page" in an embedded scenario:

Motivating rant

There are numerous articles out there talking about how to write unit tests. Still, I find that they mostly assume that the reader is an accomplished developer trying to learn to write unit tests.

In the previous article, I proposed the toolshop as a metaphor for a computer. Thinking of computers as toolshops assign them to a passive role. This was true twenty years ago, but with the advent of global networking and - particularly - with mobile computing, computers can no longer be called passive; they are becoming symbiotic. Indeed, we increasingly depend on them to remind us of what we should do, to make movie recommendations, to do a thousand boring chores we can no longer be bothered to do ourselves.

In order for there to be meaningful learning about computing, we need metaphors for computers. In order to learn, humans build whole networks of information pieces at once and so need some simplifications to bootstrap these networks. The most powerful such simplifications are metaphors.

Thus, in order to learn about computers, we need some way of thinking about them. In this article, I propose the first such metaphor.