Topic: Java

Griffon Tutorials: Adding Useful Logging

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, November 13, 2009 @ 5:04 am

I'm gathering as much as I can on Griffon and how people are using it. Some things you can translated from Grails, but not everything. So here, as a public service, is the first of many Griffon tutorial pointers.

Dabble->Scribble has a nice blog entry on including log4j logging in Griffon. My favorite part? One of his goals for logging is to "Filter out the cruft from Groovy's massive stacktraces." Amen.

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

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.
Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (2)

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.

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

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.

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

Software Development

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.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (3)

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.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (1)

Software Development

IT Mill Toolkit 5 out of Beta

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, March 10, 2009 @ 4:17 pm

With the release of IT Mill Toolkit 5.3.0, the server-side RIA framework is now ready for production. I announced the initial release of 5.0 back in December of 2007. Since that time, IT Mill 5 has gone through several revisions and the release of GWT 1.5 (which means you can use Java 5 now on both the client and the server). As a reminder, server-side RIA frameworks let you write your app completely in the server and uses a client-side Ajax engine to render the interface. The nice wrinkle with IT Mill is that both the server side and the client side are written in Java, so if you want to add a component, you don't have to break out the JavaScript (see the extensive and high quality reference manual for details on how to develop your own custom components in GWT). If you're a Java shop, that's got to be a good thing.

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

Software Development

Bean of the Devil: Arguing the Affirmative

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, March 2, 2009 @ 3:29 pm

I've gotten lots of feedback, much of it asking "what's the alternative?" to using beans and getters and setters. I'll make a deal with my skeptical readers. I'll argue the negative, with examples, if they argue the affirmative. In other words, you show me some places where you can't get around using getters and setters and I'll show you all sorts of places for the next few weeks, from real open source projects, where people have screwed the pooch with unnecessary getters and setters.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (4)

Software Development

Grails: Delegating to GORM Persistence in Java

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, February 11, 2009 @ 11:43 pm

For a recent project, I needed to plug some Java code into a Grails app. I wanted to use GORM for persistence, but couldn't introduce the interfaces, proxies, and factories into the java code which is required for existing solutions to this problem.

Basically, my constraint was that the java code itself couldn't be altered to work inside the grails app. The solution I came up with is pretty simple, but works well.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (1)

Software Development

Learning PureMVC the Hard Way (is there any other way?)

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, December 23, 2008 @ 1:29 pm

This ends week one of my investigations into PureMVC. So far I'm impressed with the framework itself in it's many versions and incarnations, but the documentation and tutorials for platforms other than Flex leave something to be desired. To all those folks that claim that Cairngorm is easier to learn than PureMVC, I can agree, but only because of this lack of good documentation.

So what should we Java/GWT developers do? Taking a cue from my colleague Noel Rappin, we should Read the Source, Luke. This code reading is a triangulation excercise worthy of Bill Clinton, involving API docs, source in other languages and source in other versions and platforms.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (2)

Software Development

PureMVC, Spanning the Platform Spectrum?

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, December 16, 2008 @ 3:51 pm

At Pathfinder we do a fair amount of desktop style development -- iPhone/Cocoa, WebForms, Swing -- and web application development -- Grails, Rails, JSP, ASP.NET, etc., etc.. In the last two years we, like a lot of other software development shops, have experienced a convergence in our efforts. The web is coming to the desktop in the form of Air and the Desktop is coming to the web in the form of RIA's. Now web MVC, which used to be a pretty benign pattern mostly concerned with app flow and validation, is starting to resemble desktop MVC, which has to deal with document-centric models and long lived views and all of the plumbing that requires.

So we recently had a powwow between all the different parties to talk about MVC and this convergence. With the exception of the insufferable Mac and iPhone developers and their disgustingly mature Cocoa framework, we all agreed it would be nice to have an application level MVC framework for each platform. We also agreed that Swing is a great example of what happens when the vendor doesn't provide such a thing -- spaghetti code that relies on component level MVC and hard wiring at the application level. There are a few MVC frameworks for Swing, such as TikeSwing and Spring Rich Client (soon to be superseded by Spring Desktop), but for every Swing app that has this sort of design, there are hundreds that are just a mess.
Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (1)

Software Development

A Java Programmer’s transition to Ruby on Rails

Jason Sendelbach, Tuesday, October 28, 2008 @ 10:34 am

There is much out there on the topic of migrating to Ruby on Rails for an experienced Java programmer. I figured I'd add my two cents, as I have finally drunk the Kool-Aid. I switched to Ruby on Rails late last year, and developed a subscription and content management system in Ruby on Rails, went back to a Java project, and then back to Ruby on Rails. The switch back to Java gave me an interesting insight into the things I love and hate about both development platforms.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (6)

Technologies and Platforms

JSTM for GWT: An Interesting Solution for Object Replication and Synchronization

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, April 18, 2008 @ 3:00 pm

Didier Girard, the peripatetic publisher of onGWT, read my post yesterday and pointed me toward XSTM, the open source OO distributed object cache. It has Java, .NET and GWT implementations that can interoperate.

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (2)

Software Development

GWT 1.5: Get Ready to Fix All of Your JSNI that Uses long

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, April 3, 2008 @ 12:58 pm

I've been humming along with GWT 1.5, reading the release notes and compiling from trunk. Today I had a nasty little surprise. All of my JSNI code that used long as either a parameter or return value stopped working. So, something like the following...

public native long method(long param) /*-{
   // do something useful
}-*/;

...would throw a nice little exception in hosted mode:

Return value of type 'long' is an opaque, non-numeric value in JS code
Parameter 'value': 'long' is an opaque, non-numeric value in JS code

Continue reading »

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

Software Development

QWT: Qooxdoo Web Toolkit

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, March 28, 2008 @ 3:39 pm

Qooxdoo is an Ajax framework that I haven't spent much time with, but after meeting the guys of Qooxdoo at AjaxWorld East and finding out that it's pronounced "guckst du," as in the German slang "Was guckst du?" (Rough translation: "What are you looking at?"), my interest has been piqued.

One interesting recent addition to qooxdoo is QWT, the Qooxdoo Web Toolkit, a Java to JavaScript "compiler" that works with the qooxdoo framework. I put "compiler" in quotations because, after looking at the code, it looks more like a Java to JavaScript translator. Also, where GWT has a hosted mode where you can debug in Java, QWT doesn't appear to have that feature, so debugging wonky QWT code promises to be a bit of an adventure.

Still, an community effort of this kind indicates that qooxdoo is a vibrant framework. I intend to give qooxdoo a closer look over the next few months.

Technorati Tags: ajax, qooxdoo, qwt, gwt, java

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (2)

Software Development