NFJS COSS 2008 1st Day Wrap Up

It is the morning after the first day of the No Fluff Just Stuff Central Ohio Software Symposium 2008 and I am writing this blog at 6:05 am because I am still so mentally stimulated I could not sleep at all last night so I gave up trying. I hope it does not catch up with me during today's sessions.

I really enjoyed Jared Richardson's, author of Ship It! A Pratical Guide to Successful Software Projects, keynote called Career 2.0. He announced he was writing a book of the same name that he expects to finish in January. In his keynote, he encouraged us to take control of our careers by improving our visibility in the industry. Some of his suggestions for getting started were writing, speaking and contributing to open source. He recommended setting goals but starting with simple steps like writing a blog, giving lunch and learns in your office or contributing documentation to your favorite open source project or maybe one you want to learn more about.

I have to agree with Jared completely. During my exit interview from college with my advisor, I was asked what I wanted to do with my career. I told her I don't know. But I did know there were two things I did not want to do. I did not want to write and I did not want to teach. 12 years, 4 books, several articals, numerous technical classses, many conferences and COJUG presentations I can say that was a very narrow minded view. I have found those are two of my favorite things to do and doing them have opened so many doors including free trips to Europe. I also discovered that contributing and observing open sources has really improved my disipline as a developer. It has allowed me to be exposed to more projects and practices then I could even be exposed to in my consulting practice. It allows me to see more of what works and what doesn't.

I also attended Scott Davis's, author of Groovy Recipes, Blue Pill and Red Pill presentations I had heard so much about from Java One. I was not dissappointed. I think it was a great introduction to Groovy for Java developers.

Free Groovy and Grails training and copy of Beginning Groovy and Grails

On March 10th, I made the offer to provide free 1 1/2 hours of Groovy and Grails training to any companies in the Central Ohio area. This offer has been very popular. With the recent publication of my book Beginning Groovy and Grails, I want re-offer this opportunity and sweeten the deal by providing one free copy of Beginning Groovy and Grails to any companies receiving the training. The training defines Groovy and Grails and demonstrates their capabilities with a live coding demo including some AJAX examples. If you are interested in learning more about taking advantage of this offer, please email me at groovy@juddsolutions.com.

Eclipse ${project_loc} errors during Grails development

In your Grails development with Eclipse, if you have ever used the Run Launch configuration provided by Grails or followed Add domain classes etc. instructions on the Grails Eclipse IDE Integration wiki page, you may have received the Eclipse error message “Variable references empty selection: ${project_loc}”.

This is caused by the fact that certain actions can cause Eclipse to loose focus of the current project. To resolve the issue, simply select your current project in the Package Explorer or Navigator and repeat task that caused the error. This can get annoying so another alternative is to replace ${project_loc} with ${workspace_loc}\project_name if your project in your workspace directory.

Announcing Beginning Groovy and Grails Book

Ok, Beginning Groovy and Grails has been available for about a week and my co-authors have already announced it but I wanted to wait to make my announcement when the electronic/PDF version was available. It was a long but fun process and I am very proud of the results. I think we have managed to put together a book that will easily enable developers to get up to speed with what they need to know in Groovy to begin being productive in Grails. I think the remainder of the book does a good job of providing a strong foundation of the common things, plug-ins and tips a new Grails developer will need to know in order to put together a fully functional Web 2.0 application. Currently Amazon.com is sold out of print versions but you can still order and they will be getting more soon. Or you can purchase the print or electronic version from the Apress website.

eApps is great for Grails hosting

In episode 58 of the Grails Podcast, Glen and Sven spoke about a Grails hosting service that costs about a dollar a day if used in production. So, I thought I would share my experiences in hosting Grails applications. For the past year I have used eApps for my Java, PHP and Grails hosting. I have been extemely happy with them from a support, feature and price perspective. I have used many hosting services in the past including other Java hosting services and eApps is definitely the best. My Beginning Groovy and Grails co-authors, Joseph Nusairat and Jim Shingler also use them for hosting as well.

eApps starts Java hosting at $20 a month for Tomcat and a offers a $30 option for JBoss or Glassfish which is less than a dollar a day. It also includes database options of MySQL, PostgreSQL or Derby. It has a load of other standard options such as email, ftp, control panel, PHP, Ruby On Rails, etc. But my favorite features are root access to my own virtual server, DNS configuration through control panel, easily hosting of multiple domains with one account (which can bring the daily cost down furture) and a Subversion or CVS repository.

I personally use the JBoss option while Joseph and Jim are using the Tomcat option.

Agile Web Development with Groovy and Grails at ITX Forum

I will be presenting "Agile Web Development with Groovy and Grails for the Java Platform" at the ITX Forum sponsored by Compuware on Tuesday May 27, 2008 from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm at the Compuware Columbus Branch located 8351 North High Street Suite 200, Columbus Ohio 43235. This is a free event. If you are interested in attending, please RSVP to sara.christian@compuware.com by Friday May 23, 2008.

Posted my Agile Development with Groovy and Grails presentation

I have given a presentation I call Agile Development with Groovy and Grails at CodeMash, the Columbus Ruby Brigade, and other places around Columbus, Ohio. Unfortunately most of the presentation shows the power of Groovy and Grails in demo but if you are interested you can download it at http://www.juddsolutions.com/downloads/AgileDevelopmentwithGroovyandGrails.pdf.

In addition, I offer to freely give this presentation to any companies or organizations interested in Groovy and Grails in the central Ohio area.

Groovy Meta Libraries

The more and more I write Groovy, the more I really like its meta-programming (Meta-Object Protocol or MOP) capabilities. I find myself frequently refactoring code into meta methods of existing Java classes that would have otherwise been methods in some utility classes. I am slowly building a libraries of these I would like to reuse. Unfortunately one thing that challenges me is what is the best practices for turning them into reusable meta libraries. I would like to be able to package them in a jar and just drop them in the classpath and they would be automatically available(bootstrapped). This would make them easier to carry between projects and share with the community. There would also have to be a good way of creating good GroovyDoc like we have with the GDK. If somebody has a recommendation or idea I would love to hear it. Otherwise, I wonder if there could be a standard way to use the Java jar service provider mechanism like JDBC driver do now to auto register.

I might be getting this DSL stuff

I know I am a little slow. I usually have to hear and see something three times before I start to grasp it. I know it was that way with Aspects and it has definitely been that way with DSLs. At every conference I have gone to for the last 2 years I have made sure to attend DSL talks. I have probably seen Neal Ford speak on the topic at least five times alone. By this point, I have definitely understood the concepts. Hearing Neal Ford's Starbuck's language example gave me that aha moment. But I have not been able to take it to the next step. I have not been able to put it into practice. That may be because I have been writing code so long I don't see problem with curly braces and long lists of method chaining and ugly parameters. But tonight, I think I got it. I think I saw the value in a whole new way.

I took this simple example written in Groovy that only a programmer could love.

println this.class.getResourceAsStream('readme.txt').getText()

This example only reads a file found in the classpath and then prints it to standard out. It might look pretty standard to developers but to anybody else it looks like a cryptic foreign language. This example is even in Groovy which simplifies the code a lot compared to a Java equivalent. (I actually started writing a Java equivalent for this post but it was too painful after writing the Groovy solution so I stopped.)

So after looking at this example, I set out to write the same functionality in a human readable format. In all the DSL sessions I have attended, they always say start of with the end in mind and make it look like a sentence.

So, I came up with "write readme.txt contents". In code it looks like the following example:

write 'readme.txt'.contents()

Not to bad for my first DSL. I think the intent is pretty clear. Next is how I implemented it.

String.metaClass.contents = {
this.class.getResourceAsStream(delegate).getText()
}

def write = { file ->
println file
}

write 'readme.txt'.contents()

You can see I used a little bit of Groovy's MOP (Meta-Object Programming) to add a contents method to the String class that does the resource loading base on the delegate which is the object on which the message was passed which in this case is the 'readme.txt' String. Next I defined a write closure that does a println on the parameter passed. Note using Groovy's optional parentheses makes it flow much more like a natural sentence.

Now that I have reached this milestone, I am afraid all standard code is going to repulse me. I know I am stuggling to write Java code after having used Groovy.

Free Groovy and Grails lunch and learn

Over the last year, I have become a huge fan of Groovy and Grails. I believe the speed of development combined with the short learning curve and the power of the Java platform will make them the future of the Java platform. If you want know why I believe this, I am offering a free hour and a half lunch and learn to companies in the Central Ohio area. This is a presentation I gave at CodeMash and to several companies in the area. The presentation defines Groovy and Grails and then demonstrates their capabilities with a live coding demo including some AJAX examples. If you are interested in learning more about scheduling me to speak at your next lunch and learn, please email me at groovy@juddsolutions.com.

Groovy Ant task is for Groovy Scripts

Groovy includes an Ant task for executing either file based or embedded Groovy. I recently discovered the file option denoted by the src attribute must be a Groovy script and not a Groovy class containing a main method. If you have used the Java task, you might expect the Ant arg set to be passed as a parameters to the main method since it is the common Ant convention for passing command line arguments. However, as you can see in the following snippet of code from org.codehaus.groovy.ant.Groovy, a GroovyShell is created and the args are passed as a property to the script.

final GroovyShell groovy = new GroovyShell(classLoader, new Binding(), configuration);
try {
final Script script = groovy.parse(txt, scriptName);
script.setProperty("ant", new AntBuilder(this));
// code removed for brevity
script.setProperty("args", cmdline.getCommandline());
script.run();
}

This behavior was unexpected since it does not follow the normal Ant convention and because the documentation states the src attribute is a File containing Groovy statements rather than stating it expects a Groovy Script.