Andy

Actor style messaging and honey do lists

Andrew Glover — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:56:44 -0500

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

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ESDC 2010 resources

Andrew Glover — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:48:39 -0500

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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Free lunches, mousetraps and the Actor model

Andrew Glover — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:01:25 -0500

A politician once mused

A free lunch is only found in mousetraps.

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easyb will support behavior tagging

Andrew Glover — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:31:59 -0500

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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Book Review: DSLs in Boo

Andrew Glover — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:34:16 -0500

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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Introduction to easyb video

Andrew Glover — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:48:14 -0500

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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Forrester’s outlook for 2010: less fat, more meat

Andrew Glover — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:56:10 -0500

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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Development 2.0 concepts at ESDC

Andrew Glover — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:30:54 -0500

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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Recent news from the easyb front

Andrew Glover — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:53:52 -0500

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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Groovy’s Gaelyk on an IBM podcast

Andrew Glover — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:28:33 -0500

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with IBM DeveloperWorks’ Scott Laningham regarding the Gaelyk framework. In this short conversation, I talk about how Gaelyk facilitates rapid development and deployment of Google App Engine applications.

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Speaking Gaelyk is easy with the App Engine

Andrew Glover — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:07:45 -0500

The introduction of the Google App Engine for both Python and Java has resulted in various frameworks emerging that facilitate developing applications targeted for Google’s infrastructure.

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Book Review: Programming Scala

Andrew Glover — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:04:06 -0500

One more than one occasion, I’ve found myself yearning for a more functional paradigm that facilitates easier concurrency programming on the JVM.

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To EasyMock or to Mockito?

Andrew Glover — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:17:00 -0500

From time to time, I’ve found that mocking various dependencies can be helpful in testing behavior. Briefly, mocking an object allows you to fake its behavior so as to more fully isolate some other object depending on this behavior — the classic use case is that of mocking a data access layer, for example. In this case, testing some object that depends on a DAO object becomes a bit easier if you can mock out the DAO and thus not have to worry about an associated database, etc.

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Provisioning a Hudson CI server

Andrew Glover — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:42:54 -0500

As I wrote about before, CI in a Box is one of the easiest ways to get up and running with Continuous Integration– in fact, if you don’t believe me, check out the CI in a Box tutorial video.

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CouchDB is so Groovy

Andrew Glover — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:46:25 -0500

Without a doubt, the burst of innovation occurring in the open source world over the last few years has led to an increase in developer productivity, baby. Freely available tools, frameworks, and solutions address once-common time sinks. Apache’s CouchDB is no exception. It’s amazingly easy to get going with CouchDB once you have it up and running.

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Comparing Scala and Groovy via ScalaTest and easyb

Andrew Glover — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:40:25 -0500

Because it’s my bag, I’ve recently taken to learning Scala.

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CouchDB on EC2 in 3 1/2 minutes

Andrew Glover — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:35:29 -0500

CouchDB is an open source document oriented database written in Erlang that allows you to model domains in a flexible manner as a self-contained document that contains no schema but, instead, a roughly similar blueprint to other documents.

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XML verification just got easier with easyb

Andrew Glover — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:57:52 -0500

There’s myriad ways to validate XML these days; in fact, with Groovy, the mechanics of parsing XML with <a href="http://groovy.codehaus.org/Reading+XML+using+Groovy%27s+XmlSlurper">XMLSlurper</a> couldn’t be easier! Nevertheless, from time to time, because it’s my bag, baby, I’ve found that I’ve needed an easy way to validate XML documents without having to actually parse them myself.

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EC2 is easier than you think

Andrew Glover — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:22:41 -0500

As I’ve written about before with respect to Development 2.0, the future of application infrastructures is already here: it’s the cloud.

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Grails hip tip: exporting schema DDLs

Andrew Glover — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:05:57 -0400

If you utilize Grails out-of-the-box and don’t change any of the connection profiles, your hip application will be bound to an in memory instance of HSQLDB — this is fine and dandy for developmental purposes, but oftentimes, you’ll want to run Grails on top of a more permanent data store (keep in mind that you can operate in such a manner with HSQLDB’s file based persistence).

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Anonymous classes are Groovy’s bag, once more

Andrew Glover — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:17:09 -0400

As I elaborated previously, Groovy

does not formally support the creation of anonymous inner classes.

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Groovy hip tip: to use or not to use setters and getters

Andrew Glover — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:04:03 -0400

In Groovy, if you define a hip object with properties, you can access them directly; that is, you don’t have to define the bogue old-style sett

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easyb now has an Eclipse plug-in!

Andrew Glover — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:00:09 -0400

The easyb team is excited to report that a hip Eclipse plug-in is in the works and an initial version is already available due to the copacetic work of both Darran White and Robert Hjertmann! The plug-in works with Eclipse 3.4 and 3.5 and currently supports running behaviors (both stories and scenarios) via the a run configuration.

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You can borrow EC2 too

Andrew Glover — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:05:40 -0400

The aspects of Development 2.0 aren’t really new– but they are each increasingly becoming a reality for businesses across the board.

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Instant Continuous Integration via the cloud

Andrew Glover — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:25:02 -0400

Looking to get Continuous Integration running for your project in short order? I recently took a look at CI in a Box, which is a

cloud based solution that provides Hudson, as a CI server, Java 6, Ant and Maven 2

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