Category: Java

Getting CloudTools to Work with Grails 1.1.1

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, December 22, 2009 @ 4:46 pm

photo credit: °Florian

Yes, Cloud Foundry has been acquired by Spring Source and seems to be morphing into a for-pay service, and there hasn't been a new build packaged on the Cloud Tools project page since January of 2009, but if you dig in the SVN repo, you see there's a bit of activity. Before I try building from source, I wanted to see how hard it would be to get 0.6 Grails plugin working with a Grails 1.1.1 app.

Well, harder than I thought. There's a real lack of documentation around cloudtools for one, and the radio silence on the project page over the last few months hasn't helped. Fortunately, Don over at AlterThought has put together a nice post that covers most of the pitfalls and problems with the CloudTools Grails Plugin. A few things they don't address and I thought I'd throw in here:

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Software Development

GWT 2.0 RC1 Released

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, November 18, 2009 @ 2:34 pm

Well, GWT 2.0 RC1 (yes!) is out. I was going to wait for a while with some of my new projects until switching them over to GWT 2.0, but given the pace of the GWT 2.0 project, I may just switch them over now rather than going through a painful migration.

I'm especially eager to use UiBinder to do declarative UI creation. Just specify how your interface should look in XML:
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Software Development

Grails and Google App Engine: Birthing Pains

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, November 4, 2009 @ 4:45 pm

Whenever you can get a free, publicly available place to deploy your applications, your first instinct is to grab it with both hands. Google App Engine is one of those places. Each developer can deploy up to 10 different apps in development mode.

I've been working on a grails app recently that uses the grails App Engine Plugin. Along with the GORM-JPA Plugin, which gives you some  of the usual grails GORM goodness, you can write some reasonably interesting grails apps.
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Software Development

Coming Soon: Android Wireless Application Development Review

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, November 2, 2009 @ 5:46 pm

Just got my hands on a copy of Android, Wireless Application Development by Conder and Darcey and have been working my way through the first three chapters (really, the actual development starts in chapter 3).So far so good. Some of the pseudo JVM (Dalvik) takes a little bit of getting used to, but it's not really that bad. I'd say that the real thing that pops out at me is that I want a way of developing iPhone and Android applications at the same time, without having to jump through hoops to do so.

I should have a full review of it up in a week or two.

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Software Development

Griffon and a PureMVC Plugin: Some Initial Thoughts

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, October 21, 2009 @ 10:59 am

I finally have some small amount of spare time to start working on my Griffon PureMVC plugin. One of the first things to think about is where to we make the marriage between the two frameworks?

Griffon has Models, Views and Controllers, as does PureMVC (actually, it has Commands, Mediators and Proxies, which essentially perform the tasks under MVC). My initial thought is that Griffon's MVC triads really perform the tasks of a complex view, and PureMVC wires these complex views together via it's message bus. So, my thinking is to wrap each MVC triad into a Mediator, with the Mediator mostly talking to the Griffon controller and perhaps the Griffon model.

I'll make some more posts here as my thinking and experimenting evolves.

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Software Development

GWT 2.0: Cool Beans on In Browser Development Mode

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, October 12, 2009 @ 2:33 pm

I have a short list of things that I don't like about GWT. They are:

1. You have to use a special browser to debug in Java. That browser doesn't always behave the way IE or Firefox or Safari does. And you need OS specific distributions which can make it a little tricky to share a project between developers with different OS platforms.
2. GWT apps download as a massive hunk of code. There's no way to dynamically load code as you need it.
3. Building UI's dynamically, through a sort of XUL mechanism is a pain in the ass for non-standard components. Just talk to the Vaadin folks about the hoops they had to jump through.
4. The annoying dependency on SWT for tests.

So, what does 2.0 promise? To resolve these four things, and a few more. Check out the GWT 2.0 Milestone 1 release announcement:

In-Browser Development Mode: Prior to 2.0, GWT hosted mode provided a special-purpose "hosted browser" to debug your GWT code. In 2.0, the web page being debugged is viewed within a regular-old browser. Development mode is supported through the use of a native-code plugin for each browser. In other words, you can use development mode directly from Safari, Firefox, IE, and Chrome.

Code Splitting: Developer-guided code splitting allows you to chunk your GWT code into multiple fragments for faster startup. Imagine having to download a whole movie before being able to watch it. Well, that's what you have to do with most Ajax apps these days -- download the whole thing before using it. With code splitting, you can arrange
to load just the minimum script needed to get the application running and the user interacting, while the rest of the app is downloaded as needed.

Declarative User Interface: GWT's UiBinder now allows you to create user interfaces mostly declaratively. Previously, widgets had to be created and assembled programmatically, requiring lots of code. Now, you can use XML to declare your UI, making the code more readable, easier to maintain, and faster to develop. The Mail sample has been updated to use the new declarative UI.

Bundling of resources (ClientBundle): GWT has shipped with ImageBundles since GWT v1.4, giving developers automatic spriting of images. ClientBundle generalizes this technique, bringing the power of combining and optimizing resources into one download to things like text files, CSS, and XML. This means fewer network round trips, which in turn can decrease application latency -- especially on mobile applications.

Using HtmlUnit for running GWT tests: GWT 2.0 no longer uses SWT or the old mozilla code (on linux) to run GWT tests. Instead, it uses HtmlUnit as the built-in browser. HtmlUnit is 100% Java. This means there is a single GWT distribution for linux, mac, and windows, and debugging GWT Tests in development mode can be done entirely in a Java debugger.

Looks like Xmas has come early. I've been working with the browser plugin for a little bit and it is just a joy to use. One down side, of course, is that Intellij 9.0 will be out of date re: GWT the day it is released.

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Software Development

Questions About Griffon

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, October 9, 2009 @ 1:03 pm

Time to answer some questions about Griffon:

1. What is the size of the jar that gets generated for a Griffon jar?
   If you package it all up ('griffon package'), then a vanilla Griffon jar weighs in at 4.7M. That's mostly the Groovy runtime (4.4M) and the Griffon runtime (204k). If you're concerned about download size for Java Web Start, then you won't want to bundle it as a single jar, but rather let your users download the Groovy and Griffon runtimes once, then your app specific jar as it is updated.
2. Can Griffon apps be distributed via Java Web Start?
   Yes. When you run 'griffon package', you get an executable jar, an applet, a JWS app and a 'zip' that is structured as a directory with bin and lib subdirs and batch and shell files to run the application. In short, most ways that you may want to deploy the application.

There is even an installer plugin that allows you to package your app as an izPack (platform independent), RPM (Linux) or DMG (Mac) distribution. It will also create app (Mac) or exe (via JSmooth) launchers for Mac and Windows. Pretty sweet.

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Software Development

Does your project have Code Ownership Culture?

Sharad Jain, Wednesday, September 2, 2009 @ 12:09 pm

Code Ownership is a well known term in software development. Depending on how you define it, it may be a good thing or bad. When a developer sees code-ownership as him/her owning a piece of codebase that only he/she understands enough to make changes, it is generally a bad thing. It is only when everybody is free to modify the code with a sense of responsibility that he/she should leave the code cleaner than how they found it, it is a good thing. In my view, code-ownership is a good thing when viewed as a responsibilty as opposed to a right. I view it as a Collective Code Ownership where code is not owned by a single person or pair but is owned by an entire team.

So, the question is: How to determine if your project/organization has that collective code ownership culture. And what team members (including managers ) can do to create/encourage it.

Does your project have collective code ownership?
Here are few things you may want to ask yourself to determine if your organization/project has collective ownership culture.

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Software Development

Asterisk-Java Testing with Groovy

Ivan Moscoso, Thursday, July 2, 2009 @ 8:03 am

Recently I have taken a bit of a detour into the world of telephony, working with Asterisk-Java, which by itself is a very valuable tool, and worth knowing a bit about if you are integrating a system with Asterisk. While it is a Java-based library, I am integrating it into a Grails application.

We have a fairly comprehensive suite of unit tests asserting that desired behaviors are triggered upon certain events initiated through the Event API. This is made even easier, as usual, with Groovy-- specifically on the testing front. Here I show two hypothetical test cases, followed by supporting code that works specifically with the Asterisk-Java classes...

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software development best practices

How to learn a new programming language or framework

Sharad Jain, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 @ 10:03 am

While never untrue, it is more of a necessity now, that a programmer should know more than just one language or framework. After being a focussed Java/J2EE developer for a long time since college, in the last couple of years, I plunged into .NET, Ruby/Rails and then Javascript/prototype/jQuery etc and now onto groovy/grails. With name like Erlang, Scala, Compass, git, blueprint, flex flying around us everywhere, it can be overwhelming and we need a plan to pick, peruse, acquire them. Here is a list of things I do when learning a new skill.

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Software Development

Grails: Custom Parent/Child Aware Tags

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, June 3, 2009 @ 6:56 am

Recently, I needed to create a special tag in Grails which would render specific children in a way that is aware of their order. I wanted to stick entirely with markup (not passing an array to a tag), and also wanted to avoid putting lots of logic inside a .tag file. While it was possible to write a tag lib which first parsed the children in a "non-render" mode, I preferred a solution which did not require doing my own parsing before render. The solution I came up with isn't the most flexible, but it got the job done in a relatively clean way with minimal custom code.

The following is an example solution with the associated code and tests.
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Technologies and Platforms

Avoid the last minute security review

John McCaffrey, Wednesday, May 13, 2009 @ 4:10 am

Photo Credit:
Amagill under Creative Commons Attribution

Security is hard

Security is often an after thought, slated towards the end of a project, or after some big issue has been discovered, but the nature of security functionality, rules, roles, auditing, etc make it hard to layer in to an existing codebase effectively.

Oh, and if the code base isn't sufficiently tested, you're in for a world of hurt.

If you are a developer that was just asked to 'do a quick security check and plug any holes', you are now in the difficult position of managing the expectation that a two-week security review means "we're covered". Be realistic about what you can accomplish, setting out some short-term and long-term goals.

Do More With Less. Start with a research 'Spike'

Instead of pushing for more time to be able to 'cover it all' (even though you have no idea what 'it all' is yet), it might be better to start with a shorter analysis phase, where you detail your findings, identify any trends, and include recommendations for process change. I've found that even the most demanding manager is appreciative and understanding when you ask for a small amount of time in order to produce a better estimate, than to just immediately demand more time without any evidence as to why.

Plan for success

With your analysis and recommendations in hand,
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Software Development

Bugs can’t be estimated

John McCaffrey, Tuesday, May 5, 2009 @ 11:37 pm

In an earlier post about the benefits of Agile and Scrum, I made a statement that bugs by their nature are not the same as normal features, and I wanted to take a moment to try and make my point a little clearer. Bugs and estimation have been a hot topic with us lately, but interestingly we are all working on different projects and actually have a slightly different take on the subject.

My definition of a bug is: A feature that was specified, and you attempted to deliver, but is not working according to your intentions. (ie. "I thought it WAS saving to the database")

Not a bug: A feature or variation that you hadn't intended to create in the first place. ("Oh, I didn't know it was supposed to do that when you clicked the back button")

And with that understanding I say "Bugs can't be estimated"
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Software Development

Are You Building an Application or an Antique Web Framework?

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, May 5, 2009 @ 5:47 pm

photo credit: dave_7

A few years ago, a friend of mine asked me to help him estimating the conversion of a client/server application to the web. He came armed with a spreadsheet of features, I came armed with Ibuprofen and a red pen.

My usual approach to estimating involves breaking down the features into things that can be implemented by a pair of developers within a two week period. I give these a complexity factor of 1-5, then run them through an empirically derived formula to come up with an estimate in terms of person-iterations. (It's actually a little more complicated than that, but this is the main effort). Getting the count and size of these mini-features right is the key aspect of this technique. His spreadsheet had almost 300 features listed, and so we settled in for a day of fun.
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Software Development

Oracle and Sun: What it may mean for Open Source Landscape

Sharad Jain, Wednesday, April 22, 2009 @ 9:01 am

photo credit: Potato Benevolence

The recent acquisition of Sun by Oracle, and not IBM, took the community by surprise. Open source Java developers have benefited immensely from Sun's Java and IBM's contribution to Java space. IBM has a generally favorable view from open source community since IBM has few significant open-source contributions including those to Apache software foundation and Eclipse. When I heard about IBM's talk of acquiring Sun, I was certainly bothered by the demise of Sun as a company but nevertheless hoped that whatever happens, Java and MySQL, and the strong community behind it, should stay largely intact. And I felt comfortable with Java landing in IBM's lap considering its largest contribution to Java community by any corporate vendor. Oracle is a strong and focussed company but its contribution to open source world is minimal. As open source developer or company, you are also concerned about the fate of mysql. Like everybody, I am trying to make sense of what this will mean for the open source developers.

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Software Development