Getting used to Java's Date and Calendar classes

Today I managed to complete the createBooking method of my BookingController. At least it runs without any errors. But the page that shows the week's bookings does not reflect the added booking. I spent quite a lot of time debugging my Calendar-related code. For a while I forgot that its MONTH field's index is zero-based, which caused me a lot of confusion. I was again tempted to start using Joda Time but I would like to refrain from adding too many dependencies. I would also have needed to add joda-time-hibernate and find/create property editors for setting up the Joda Time objects. Sure, this might have been something that would have taken like 15 minutes and worked perfectly, but it could also have led to unwanted trouble.

Anyway, when I was trying to see how far my BookingController was to working, I was doing some really painful manual testing. First I restarted Jetty, then I refreshed my main page, then I had to create a new user, then I went back to the main page, then I clicked the booking time I wanted, then I clicked submit on the form and then finally I would see an exception or error. Not very agile at all. The easiest way to start looking at what's wrong would be to run a separate hsqldb process which I could connect a DB client to and see if my requests have made any changes to the DB. But a better way would be to create a test case that calls my controller instead and then verifies that the expected changes have happened to the database. It would be even better to extract some stuff from my controller so I can test the url routing and form parsing separate from the database-related activities.