Andy

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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Grails hip tip: working behind a proxy?

Andrew Glover — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:53:56 -0400

If you find yourself behind a bogue proxy when working with Grails, you might find it difficult to download various plug-ins. Nevertheless, the Grails team already solved this problem for you — simply issue the set-proxy command via the command line and a nifty script will prompt you for any required credentials.

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easyb 0.9.6 released

Andrew Glover — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:29:07 -0400

The easyb team is excited to announce that version 0.9.6 is out! This version adds a number of hip features including:

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easyb now supports re-running failed behaviors

Andrew Glover — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:18:23 -0400

The latest version of easyb (that is, 0.9.6) contains two new features (among others, man):

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Continuous Integration with Grails

Andrew Glover — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:03:25 -0400

My friend, John Ferguson Smart recently wrote an article for java.net entitled “Grails and Continuous Integration: An Essential Combo” in which he demonstrates how to leverage Hudson’s Grails plug-in. Hudson is a hip CI server and having the ability to monitor a Grails project is quite neat. I highly recommend reading his article!

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Subversion with proxies

Andrew Glover — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:29:23 -0400

If you happen to reside on a network that requires proxy authentication, command-line Subversion won’t work. Unless, of course, you configure Subversion to leverage a proxy correctly.

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Configuring Gant and Ivy to work with a proxy

Andrew Glover — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:44:49 -0400

If you find yourself behind a proxy and happen to be attempting to build a software project that leverages both Gant and Ivy (as I was recently) you’re in for a surprise: Ivy won’t download the required project dependencies.

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Hello Google App Engine

Andrew Glover — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:21:15 -0400

As I’ve written about before, open source solutions and borrowed infrastructures are changing the character of

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Increasing Tomcat’s memory

Andrew Glover — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:38:56 -0400

If you happen to casually peruse the Grails documentation, you might notice the following note regarding memory (please note, man, that the emphasis has been added by yours truly):

If memory is not a problem on your server then allocate a large amount of memory, such as 512M or more. Also use the server VM option. EG: (-server -Xms512M -Xmx512M). Usually it is better to set both min and max heap size to the same in server applications.

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XML validation is easyb

Andrew Glover — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:23:53 -0400

Ever find yourself needing to validate XML? If so, you might want to consider using XMLUnit. As I’ve written before:

When you get that feeling that you’re working too hard, you can usually assume someone else has figured out an easier way to solve the problem. When it comes to programmatically verifying XML documents, the solution that comes to mind is XMLUnit.

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Anonymous classes are Groovy’s bag

Andrew Glover — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:34:29 -0400

Because it’s my bag, I’ve found that many Java developers aren’t aware of how to leverage anonymous classes. Indeed, they are an extremely handy feature, which can yield concise, but expressive code (even in Java, baby). Briefly, an anonymous class is

a local class without a name. An anonymous class is defined and instantiated in a single succinct expression using the new operator.

Succinct is such a hip word, man, don’t you think?

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Proxies with Cargo

Andrew Glover — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:26:01 -0400

Cargo is hip project that automates container management in a generic fashion, such that the same API used to deploy a WAR file to Tomcat can also start and stop JBoss. Cargo can also download and install a container automatically (which happens to be one of my all time favorite features!).

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Validating maps with easyb

Andrew Glover — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:24:43 -0400

Often times I find myself needing to validate the contents of a hip map — that is, during the course of a story or specification, I need to ensure that a certain value, key, or name-value pair is present in an instance of some Map.

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Instant Google App Engine

Andrew Glover — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:32:01 -0400

Getting up and running on the App Engine couldn’t be any easier, man — in fact, Google even provides an Eclipse plug-in that handles just about everything for you! In order to get started though, you do need an App Engine account (which is free, by the way). Once you’ve done that, you can download the Eclipse plug-in via Eclipse’s Software Update feature as shown below.

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To recurse or not: Euler challenge #2

Andrew Glover — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:04:28 -0400

Having stumbled upon Project Euler sometime ago and solving the first problem, this disco dancer from the Age of Aquarius thought it was time to tackle problem two, which states:

Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be:

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, …

Find the sum of all the even-valued terms in the sequence which do not exceed four million.

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