Does the prospect of learning a new language daunt you? Does the effort it takes to download a jar file and place it in your classpath overwhelm you? If you answered “yes” (or even “maybe”) to either of these questions, have no fear, baby! The bright folks behind the Gaelyk framework (and not to mention Groovy itself) have lowered the bar as low as it can possibly get for checking out Groovy.

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NoSQL datastores like Bigtable and CouchDB are becoming more and more hip these days because they solve the problem of scalability on a massive scale.

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While I’m a big fan of leveraging Google’s low-level API Entity class (as decorated by Gaelyk) for persisting data into GAE’s underlying datastore, there are some up-and-coming frameworks that are worth examining. Both frameworks note the challenges with JDO and like me, prefer to work with Entity types.

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I had the pleasure of joining a number of colleagues in a panel discussion regarding the Java platform recently. The resulting dialog can be found on IBM DeveloperWorks entitled “Java platform roundtable, Spring 2010” — in this discussion with the likes of Dan Allen, J.

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The basic programming model of languages, like Java, is thread based and while multithreaded applications aren’t terribly hard to write, there are challenges to writing them correctly. What’s difficult about concurrent programming is thinking in terms of concurrency with threads. Alternate concurrency models have arisen along these lines — one that is particularly interesting, and gaining mindshare in the Java community, is the actor model.

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The easyb team has recently released version 0.9.7, which contains a scattering of features and fixes including one of my favorites: behavior tagging. Briefly, behavior tagging permits the isolation of behavior groups.

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As I previously mentioned in “Free lunches, mousetraps and the Actor model“, Edward A.

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I recently had the opportunity to present four different talks at the Enterprise Software Development Conference (or ESDC) in San Mateo, California. In an effort to provide additional data points and information, I created individual resource pages for each talk. These pages (hosted at my company’s site — beacon50.com) provide links to articles, blog entries, tutorials, and a copy of each presentation.

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A politician once mused

A free lunch is only found in mousetraps.

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Back in the Age of Aquarius, I wrote an article entitled “Use test categorization for agile builds” in which I attempted to delineate various types of tests and then went on to suggest how to categorize these various tests so as to get the most out of a build run (i.e make it fast and effective at providing meaningful feedback). Back then (and to an extent now) my concern was with test execution; that is, I like to categorize tests as fast and slow.

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While I don’t spend a lot of time on the .NET platform anymore, I’m still a big fan of Boo.

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The easyb team is pleased to announce the posting of a hip introductory video that demonstrates both specifications and stories in action. In this 8 and 1/2 minute video, you’ll learn that easyb enables you to express human readable expectations that verify any Java application (or to be more precise, anything running on the JVM) and that you express those expectations in Groovy.

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SDTimes recently published an article entitled “Five changes for application development in 2010” in which they reference a newly released Forrester report.

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In March, I’ll have the distinct pleasure of joining a number of hip friends in speaking at the Enterprise Software Development Conference (or ESDC) in San Mateo, California.

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Since the 0.9.6 release of easyb, new members have joined the development team, a number of new features have been added, more than a few issues have been addressed, and the easyb community of projects continues to evolve! For those of you living on the bleeding edge, you can build 0.9.7 from the trunk; conversely, an official 0.9.7 release is forthcoming.

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