Chris Searle

Our busy community of plugin developers have been at it again and now there is a brand new plugin for Grails that adds support for the Terracotta data grid. It was always possible to do this with a bit of manual configuration, but now the plugin automates things nicely using a few new Grails command line scripts.

This is one of the really great things about Grails and Groovy, because Groovy classes are just standard Java classes it is possible to integrate Groovy or Grails applications with any existing Java infrastructure, including data grids like Terracotta and Coherence. Awesome stuff.

Wow, the Groovy/Grails community is really getting it together. First we had the launch of grailscrowd.com, which is a social networking site for Groovy/Grails people to connect with other Groovy/Grails people. The site is built on Grails and its only been up for a few days but aldready over 600 people registered. If you haven't done so do so! The source code for GrailsCrowd is also availabe at Github

Not to be outdown, however, Glen Smith has launched the Groovy Awards ! A site dedicated to nominating the best contributors and to the Groovy / Grails community. Awards up for grabs include Groovy / Grails t-shirts and other goodies. Check it out.

On my front, I know I have been rather inactive posting. Books are really all consuming beasts. I have given a go to twittering now and again about what I'm writing about, although I'm still not sure I "get" twitter.

I just watched another amazing talk from the TED conference. Spencer Wells is a natural public speaker. He talks about where we all, as a species, came from. Amazingly enough, everyone who is alive today share a common ancestor in Africa no more than about 2000 generations, or 60,000 years ago. Wells describes the [...]

Looking back at my projects for the last two years, we’ve had a tremendous improvement in the way we’re working. There are many things that we have done to make it better, and I’m be hard pressed to pick just three things I’ve learned. After much consideration, my favorites are: Partial production; Whole team; Requirements [...]

When the building blocks of your program fail and you don’t notice, the problem can be very hard to diagnose. In most of my projects, the building blocks are the persistent objects. Using Hibernate makes it easy to create a data access layer, but if you don’t watch out, errors can sneak into equals or [...]

Stand up and be counted. Which one do you think is best of the following? Package by layer: com.app.controllers com.app.model com.app.repositories com.app.exception Or package by feature: com.app.orders com.app.invoices com.app.products I recently added a new site to my RSS reader. John O’Hanly just published a though provoking article about harmful java code idioms on JavaWorld. I don’t agree with everything he suggests, but I do find [...]

I'll be giving a talk on the state of Grails at the London Groovy+Grails user group meeting on the 31st of July. Skills Matter are hosting it as usual, be sure to sign-up here.

Groovy in Action is now available the Safari online library.

For those, who haven't heard about Safari, yet: it is an online library where you can manage a personal "bookshelf". The number of books and the time available for reading each is determined by the kind of account you subscribe for. Yes, this costs some money.

One of the cool benefits of safari is that you can search all-across your bookshelf and that the library contains a wealth of books from a growing number of technical publishers. Since recently, Manning is also among this fine circle, such that the popular "in Action" and "in Practice" books are also available.

enjoy reading
Dierk

This Norwegian languauge article pertains to an article in the Norwegian news magazine “Ny Tid” and my letter to the editor. (Dette er mitt debattinnlegg som ble publisert i Ny Tid 11. juli. Innlegget er oppfølging til Christian Lundestads veldig gode artikkel om åpen kildekode i ny tid 27. juni.) Som lead software arkitekt i Bankens [sic] [...]

Apologies for not posting as frequently recently, I've been hard at work on the second edition of "The Definitive Guide to Grails" and also working on feature development for Grails 1.1 (we now have JSP tag library support in GSP and massive improvements to the plug-in system).

Nevertheless, on to the topic of this post, we (G2One Inc - The Groovy/Grails company) have launched our public Groovy & Grails training programme in the US. Announcing this exciting news is Jeff Brown, our main guy in the US, who has this to say:

"Our training events are a fantastic experience. G2One are the folks who lead and sustain the development of both Groovy and Grails. No one understands the technology better than the people who build it. G2One training events give developers an opportunity to spend several days with a technology expert covering everything from fundamentals to advanced language and framework features.

The sessions include a perfect mix of lecture and reinforcing lab work. That hands on approach is a great way for developers to internalize the details. There is no better way to quickly get a team up and running with the technology."

Check it out!

In Let your examples flow, Dan North describes how “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY) isn’t necessarily the most important guideline for tests. While I agree with his conclusions, I think the DRY principle is still extremely important for tests. Dan’s point is that the most important attribute of tests is that they can be read like a [...]

The TED conference has some amazing talks. If you never knew you were interested in car seats for children, classical music, or feet (yeah!), some of these talks will blow you mind. A recent video that really moved me was Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. His insights and inspiration is invaluable for everyone [...]

Most students coming out of university these days are completely clueless when it comes to computer programming. This seems to be getting worse for every year. However, in between all the garbage (where garbage in this context means students not really interested in or capable of programming a computer) there are some really exceptional and brilliant talents that might just need a few more years of experiences to become really efficient superprogrammers. This number is growing. The challenge is to find and recognize these talents, and are they willing to work for you?

I believe the next generation of superprogrammers is to be found in the free and open source software communities. They have little motivation to work with traditional closed source and proprietary software. Why should they? Yes, they want to work on challenging and interesting software projects, but also they want to share their best ideas with others - where the latter is perhaps the most important motivation factor. They want their work to be viewed by others, they want respect, recognition and to be admired by their friends, they want to be part of a world-wide community. In order to hire these people you need to realize that money, internal recognition and a “career” is not enough. You might need to change your business strategy.

Consider hiring a brilliant poet, painter or musician where the message is that their work can only be presented, displayed or heard inside the company - a ridiculous proposal and of course they will refuse. The same thing is true for the next generation of superprogrammers. Given a choice they will work for a company where their work is visible for the outside world, or even better, where their work is a contribution to the software community as a whole.

We see already that many companies have a hard time realizing the impact of free and open source software. Those who do not get it will die. Those who manage to attract the next generation of superprogrammers will win.

At the last meeting in Oslo Lean Meetup Geoff Watts talked about BTs transition to agility. The most memorable part to me was when BT transformed a huge, waterfall type project with a delivery schedule measured in years into an agile project. The project set out to convert all BT customers to a new network [...]

People always talk about how learning is something that happens in groups. Last week, I got reminded of the point as a task I had previously struggled with alone became trivial in a pair programming episode. The first time I tried coding “a bowling scoring program” was in 2001. I’ve practices the exercise many times later. [...]

Three years ago, I was asked by one of our teams to give advice on how they should write a parser for a structured file format. Just having read up on SAX again, I recommended that they looked into designing it as a push parser. A push parser works by the design that the parser [...]

Brian Guan, one of the pioneers of Grails use within LinkedIn, has started a blog series about their experiences with Grails. The first post presents the slides the LinkedIn guys presented at the recent Groovy/Grails meetup at JavaOne. It makes for an interested read so check it out!

Warning: This article requires a lot of editing love before it is very useful. It might be somewhat incoherent. Read at your own risk. ;-) Silo (software): A silo system cannot easily integrate with any other system. In software, the term “silo” is used to refer to a system that is constructed as one unit from [...]

This article is a Norwegian-language version of my article Four bold claims about SOA. Dette er et utkast til en artikkel jeg ønsker å få publisert. Jeg setter stor pris på tilbakemeldinger om uklare tanker og formuleringer. To av de vanskeligste problemene vi møter innen programvareutvikling er integrasjon og det som gjerne kalles “business-IT alignment” eller forretningsorientering, [...]

We've just released Grails 1.0.3, which includes 230 issues resolutions and improvements since the last release. The release notes go through the full details, including outlining some of the new features like enum support and interactive mode.

Grails has come a long way, since the release of 1.0 Grails has been downloaded over 186000 times averaging out to around 50000 times per month. That puts it on par or not far behind some of the biggest open source projects like Spring, Hibernate and Struts in terms of downloads.

The most exciting thing for me though is the plug-in community with over 70 plug-ins in the repository some of the new ones include Axis 2 support, Java2D with GraphicsBuilder and profiling (contributed by one of the biggest Grails users LinkedIn) and debugging plug-ins. Awesome stuff.

Now I'm shifting my focus to the second edition of the book, and feature development for Grails 1.1.