Software Development

SQL for the NoSQL

Andrew Glover — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 09:31:29 -0500

But there is one slight issue with NoSQL. You can’t use SQL.

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JSON-able domain objects

Andrew Glover — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 19:25:10 -0500

JSON has arguably become the new lingua franca of the Internet; that is, JSON has become preferable for browser to server communication — over that of XML, which, as it happens, is quite verbose. JSON’s lightweight-ness makes it easily readable and easy to parse.

For example, in the case of a Retweet object (which represents a Twitter retweet), I can represent it easily enough in JSON like so:

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Moving to Git from Subversion?

Andrew Glover — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 16:18:32 -0400

Are you thinking of using Git? Are you coming from a Subversion mindset? If so, then you’ll appreciate the Git-Svn Crash Course wiki page offered by the Git team. This one-stop shop describing core Git commands and analogous SVN commands has been quite helpful to me. You too can clone, commit, pull, and push with the best of them, baby!

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Video: No-red refactoring

Johannes Brodwal — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 03:00:35 -0400

The more I code, the more I’ve learned to appreciate keeping the code clean even during complex refactorings. By “clean”, I mean that the code always compiles and the test always run.

I often find myself in a situation where I have a method call that’s starting to accumulate parameters. Something like this:

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App Engine stories are easy

Andrew Glover — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 13:07:17 -0400

With the release of easyb 0.9.8, a new plugin has hit the streets that enables easyb to more easily verify Google App Engine applications running locally.

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Groovy ETLs with Scriptella

Andrew Glover — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:16:36 -0400

The open source BI, reporting, and ETL space is bursting at the seams with capable tools. In fact, I recently had a conversation with Tim Berglund regarding open source business intelligence where he specifically mentions two highly regarded tools: Pentaho and Talend. These tools do everything under the sun when it comes to BI, including ETL.

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Concurrency conversation

Andrew Glover — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 16:40:56 -0400

I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Alex Miller and hear this thoughts on concurrency. In this podcast, Alex talks about various concurrency models, such as actors, agents, and dataflow (just to name a few). Alex does a great job of explaining why parallel programming is challenging (to do correctly, that is) and is able to elaborate on each model’s pros and cons.

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CouchDB for the relational

Andrew Glover — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:14:43 -0400

Baron Schwartz, the lead author of Oreilly’s “

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OAuth-ing Twitter with Twitter4J

Andrew Glover — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:53:25 -0400

Twitter turned off basic authentication. Finally. Henceforth, you can’t log into Twitter via its API in the traditional sense; accordingly, the following code, which uses Twitter4J isn’t valid any longer:

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MongoDB and CouchDB: vastly different queries

Andrew Glover — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:51:10 -0400

Both MongoDB and CouchDB are document-oriented datastores.

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Concrete concurrency werewolves

Andrew Glover — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:48:44 -0400

Cédric Beust has an interesting blog post entitled “Clojure, concurrency and silver bullets” where he takes issue with the notion that Clojure can yield code that

is multithread safe and it will automatically scale.

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High performance SimpleDB

Andrew Glover — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:03:15 -0400

Sid Anand, who writes the Practical Cloud Computing blog, has a series of posts entitled “SimpleDB Essentials for High Performance Users” in which he outlines a set of best practices and conventions for effectively leveraging SimpleDB. If you are using SimpleDB or are planning to, I highly recommend reading his points as they are super hip. Check out:

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Guidance on Git podcast

Andrew Glover — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 09:02:27 -0400

I’m excited to announce that IBM developerWorks has launched a new series of podcasts hosted by yours truly. These podcasts feature technical discussions with various (opinionated) luminaries on a diverse set of subjects ranging from Git to Clojure to Griffon and even .NET (just to name a few!).

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Think twice before sharding

Andrew Glover — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:29:18 -0400

I recently saw that Grails supports sharding via a nifty plugin. Briefly, sharding (as defined in Wikipedia) is a method of horizontal partitioning

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More GAE datastore resources

Andrew Glover — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:47:56 -0400

There’s an interesting interview with the creators of Twig, Objectify-Appengine, and SimpleDS, which are all ORM-like frameworks built for the GAE that facilitate working with the underlying datastore (an abstraction of Bigtable).

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Grails hip tip: LinkageError with SAXParseException

Andrew Glover — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:56:26 -0400

Recently a bogue error popped up with an existing Grails project at a client site. In an effort to abstract core domain logic (i.e. business rules) for a financial application, we decided to leverage Drools; consequently, after some prototyping of rules in a non-Grails project, we decided to start evaluating the Grails Drools plugin.

After installing said plugin, however, Grails failed to start up, instead issuing the error:

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Effortless Groovy

Andrew Glover — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:30:02 -0400

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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GAE datastore resources

Andrew Glover — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:35:49 -0400

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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A recent Java platform roundtable

Andrew Glover — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:01:38 -0400

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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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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iPFaces - Mobile Application Framework

edhouse — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 04:50:26 -0500

Edhouse has released version 1.1 of iPFaces project, the mobile framework for simple creation of native, form-oriented network applications for mobile devices (iPhone, iPAD, iPod, BlackBerry, Mobile Java).

The aim of the solution is to screen the programmer completely out from the mobile platform itself, and transfer the entire application logic to central application server level. Developers with experience with one of the supported Web technologies (ASP.Net, Java, and PHP) may start working with iPFaces virtually immediately.

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Tools and Methods

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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