Software Development

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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Effective Enterprise Java at Öredev

jhannes — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:40:37 -0500

Just three weeks ago, I was asked to step in for Ted Neward to give a tutorial at Öredev on Effective Enterprise Java. As I did not have time to get the tutorial materials printed, I present them here on the web for the participants and others.

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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 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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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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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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Euler was groovy too

Andrew Glover — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:03:18 -0400

I recently stumbled across Project Euler, which is a hip website containing quite a few different math challenges. The idea being that people can attempt to solve any particular challenge which ever way they can (that is, in any language and with any algorithm) — the site doesn’t provide answers either — you must create an account and submit your answer. Project Euler will then check your answer and issue a response — correct or incorrect.

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Agile testing: a whole team approach

Andrew Glover — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:15:04 -0400

Agile testing is about two things: a whole life-cycle and whole team approach to testing. The whole life-cycle aspect stresses leveraging testing throughout a hip process as opposed to a distinct period. Likewise, a whole team approach welcomes all parties to the quality table as everyone (yes, that means all stakeholders) accepts responsibility for building in quality.

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Agile testing: a whole life-cycle approach

Andrew Glover — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:27:32 -0400

As I elaborated in two previous hip posts entitled “Agile testing: what it’s not” and “Agile testing: what it is” agile testing boils down to two fundamental aspects — it’s about a whole life-cycle and whole team approach to testing.

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Agile testing: what it is

Andrew Glover — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:29:52 -0400

In a previous post entitled “Agile testing: what it’s not“, I attempted to define how testing has been traditionally done; with the stage set as the status quo, my definition of agile testing hopefully will make a lot more sense.

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Agile testing: what it’s not

Andrew Glover — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:00:34 -0400

Because it’s my bag, I’ve been asked on more than one occasion the question: “what is agile testing?” — that is, what does Agile mean to traditional QA teams?

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Mashups are Groovy, baby!

Andrew Glover — Sat, 23 May 2009 15:36:38 -0400

Online social networking is all the rage these days, man! In DeveloperWorks’ “Social mashups with Groovy” article, you’ll learn how to build a social network with Google Maps, Twitter, Groovy, and Ajax. By combining a Google Map with location information that Twitter exposes, you can create a mashup that allows people to view Twitter in light of a particular location. The simple application this article builds lets users view a map of their Twitter friends, a.k.a: hip geo-view of their entire network.

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Development 2.0: Borrowed infrastructures

Andrew Glover — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:21:32 -0400

In three earlier posts, I discussed the notion of Development 2.0, which aims to leverage open-source technologies and borrowed infrastructures to ultimately produce working software faster.

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Development 2.0: Open-source as a total solution

Andrew Glover — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:11:07 -0400

Because it’s my bag, in two earlier posts, I suggested that the future of software development is already here — that is, Development 2.0, which strives to produce software faster by leveraging open-source technologies and borrowing other people’s infrastructures, addresses the frustrati

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Development 2.0: Addressing the cost of IT

Andrew Glover — Thu, 14 May 2009 10:55:08 -0400

In a previous post entitled “Development 2.0“, I suggested that future development will largely be defined by fully capitalizing on open source technologies (indeed, open source has proliferated in almost every vertical market existing today) and leveraging other people&

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Development 2.0

Andrew Glover — Sun, 10 May 2009 10:18:19 -0400

Albert Einstein once contemplated

I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.

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How to stay ahead

jhannes — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:56:45 -0400

This is a test case from my current project:

Scenario: Finish gathering information
Given I have an open case
And the case has a task "gather information from X"
And the case has a task "gather information from Y"
When the user confirms that task "gather information from X" is completed
And the user confirms that task "gather information from Y" is completed
Then the case should generate a new task "evaluate customer standing"

It seems pretty run of the mill. A tester will sit down with a bunch of these and try out the application.

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Chewing the fat over Grails 1.1

Andrew Glover — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:11:06 -0400

I had the pleasure before the official release of Grails 1.1 to chat with Grails founder and ultimate hip cat Graeme Rocher for JavaWorld’s Java Technology Insider.

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Planning by value

jhannes — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 12:57:06 -0400

Agile development is easy to understand and hard to do. One of the hardest things to do is to base plans and actions on value instead of effort.

An article by Alistair Cockburn includes a story that illustrates the point:

A boy is behind on his German language home work. He now has to read ten stories and answer a set of question for each. He will be graded on the number of correct answers.

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easyb 0.9.5 is out

Andrew Glover — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:59:04 -0500

The easyb team is proud to announce version 0.9.5 is now live. It has been a long time coming and this version is jam-packed with new features, baby!

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