Gretty is one of a new school of ultra-lightweight frameworks made for building web services. Built on top of the blazingly fast Java NIO APIs, Gretty leverages Groovy as a domain-specific language for web endpoints and Grape’s Maven-style dependency management. In this article, get started with using Gretty to build and deploy Java web service applications.

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I recently had the opportunity to chat with Loggly CTO and co-founder Jon Gifford about the concept of logging as a service and how it allows for easier log management and manipulation. Loggly’s service is amazingly easy to stand-up — in fact, we’re using Loggly heavily at App47.

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EC2 is essentially a virtual computer running the OS of your choice along with various options for memory, CPU speed, and storage. EC2 is an Infrastructure as a service: itʼs bare bones computing power without the need for you to go out and buy a bunch of servers because someone (amazon.com, man) already did that for you! In fact, with EC2, you essentially rent computing resources in a data center managed by someone else.

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When Java came out and I began to spend virtually all my time building Java applications, I naively figured the days of manual memory management were gone (after all, Java has garbage collection!). Fast forward to now. The popularity of the iPhone and iPad have propelled C (really, Objective-C) back into the spotlight. And with Objective-C, the return of manual memory management (along with borderline extreme code verbosity).

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URLencode returns a string in which all non-alphanumeric characters except -_. have been replaced with a percent (%) sign followed by two hex digits and spaces encoded as plus (+) signs. It is encoded the same way that the posted … read more

Unlike relational database models, MongoDB documents can have fields which have values as arrays. The prototypical example in almost all MongoDB documentation is a document having a tags field, whose value is an array of strings, such as ["NoSQL", "Ruby", "MongoDB"]. If you’re coming from a relational world (which most of us are) then this feature, at first glance, is a bit intimidating.

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Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

A few years back while on a conference panel discussion, a panel member (Stu Halloway, if my memory serves me) in response to a question regarding how to quickly learn new APIs suggested writing unit tests. That is, the suggestion was to test the new framework, library, language as a means for learning how to use it.

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Data storage has become cheap. Consequently, we’re storing tons of it:

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As I’ve blogged and written about on various occasions, Google App Engine doesn’t just scale apps: it can also help you assemble them rapidly, using slick tools. Part 2 of “Twitter mining with Objectify-Appengine” wraps up the domain model for a Twitter-mining application, adding hooks for indexing and caching.

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