Spock is a powerful Groovy-based framework that makes testing applications written in Java (as well as Groovy, Kotlin etc.) a very pleasant experience. Because it’s built on top of good ol’ JUnit, it integrates well with most of the existing test/build tooling. However, making it play nicely with the testing infrastructure of Spring framework (especially Spring Boot) used to be a bit tricky. Luckily, the latest Spock version 1.1 comes with a few improvements that make testing Spring apps (including mocking) easier.

Since the dawn on Android development, there have always been efforts to use some of the alternative JVM languages instead of plain Java. But given the constraints of the mobile world, most of them faced issues that prevented them from receiving large adoption. Kotlin, a new language developed by JetBrains with Android in mind, aims to change this.