I’ve always liked Michael Feather’s concept of stunted frameworks. I write a lot of code that could be re-used, but it is tailored to specific projects. Adding hooks, and configuration to make the stuff more generally useful and releasable as open-source just feels like too much hassle. I wouldn’t mind, so much but I don’t want to add bulk and complications to the code I’m working on. In any case, the chances of it matching everyone else’s edge cases are slim.

Look what happened to David Megginson when he wrote SAX2:

people were screaming for all kinds of esoteric stuff that about 12 people in the world care about (i.e. entity boundaries) ….. SAX ended up with all kinds of new, optional interfaces in the distribution anyway, so it’s quite nightmarish for a new user trying to figure out what matters and what doesn’t.

It recently occurred to me that Github is an excellent mechanism for distributing stunted frameworks. To that end I’ve just added (a tiny) one for writing stubs in Java, by providing partial implementations to an interface. I first wrote about it in 2005 and have since then used it on many Java projects in lieu of more sophisticated mocking libraries.

For more information go to the project at http://github.com/paulanthonywilson/dummy-proxy/tree/master