Building on last year’s effort, I’ve been spending some time with the Pragmatic Thinking and Learning book to start thinking about my knowledge portfolio for the year ahead. I’m still not entirely clear on the fine print, but there are some themes that are really starting to run in my thinking, so I figure I should get accountable and blog it up. Here’s my stab at the tech areas I’m interested in getting across in [...]

I went through a tech goal-setting process last year, and found it pretty help, so I’m lining up for another Tech Goals plan in 2012. I commend the process to you! First let’s review last year’s list: JavaScript – Yup! I can certainly tick this one off. Did several pieces of hardcore JavaScript work for clients (some without framework support), learned enough QUnit to be dangerous, and even did a bit of Backbone.js. Android/HTML5/CSS3 – [...]

I’ve had a great couple of days at OSDC 2011! Tuesday I was hanging out at the First Ever Australian GR8 Conference, spent Tuesday night with the CJUG boys, then have been presenting today on PhoneGap to the broader OSDC conference. Great times! Interesting this is definitely one of the hardest core developer communities I have hung out with. Hardly any Macbooks/iPhones in sight and Linux laptops and Android phones everywhere! People are really committed [...]

I’m really looking forward to hanging out with the crew at osdc2011 next week in Canberra, and have been busy working on my sample code for my talks. I’ll be giving a talk titled, “Fake Your Way as a Mobile Developer Rockstar with PhoneGap” where I’ll be talking a little about a recent client project I was working on developing for iPhone,iPad,Android (phone + tablet), Blackberry, Playbook and WinPhone7. It was a true “write once, [...]

What a fantastic time we all had at SpringOne 2GX in Chicago over the last week. My head is jam packed full of information and I have so many new things to add to my list of cool Groovy tech to explore! If you’ve never made it to one (this was my first), I can highly recommend it! First things First: Relationships trump everything The absolute best part of these events is the chance to [...]

I’m just putting the final demo together for one of my sessions at SpringOne 2GX called “Does my DIV look big in this?” This talk brings together a whole bunch of technologies that I’ve been experimenting with for a while that help keep your view tier DRYer, namely: Grails Resources (for shrinking your dependencies) Various Grails and non-Grails DRY view technologies (including bean-fields, navigation, validation and other jQuery related goodness) Less.css for keeping your CSS [...]

If you’re having troubles with the Bean-Fields plugin on Grails 2.0.0.M2, there’s a quick workaround to get up and running. So if you see something like… Caused by GrailsTagException: Error executing tag <bean:form>: Cannot get property ‘class’ on null object You know you’ve tripped the issue. I’ve logged the issue in GPBEANFIELDS-40 but the root cause is actually not beanfields at all. It’s a breaking change introduced in Grails 2.0.0-M2 for performance improvements (GRAILS-8001). The change [...]

We’ve all been there. Maybe you were in a rush to get your latest Grails app out the door, or maybe it was a hobby project you were doing in your spare time and things just got out of hand. Hack code, click refresh, hack code, click refresh, (pause to complain about why Grails needs a restart), hack code, click refresh. You know the drill. Refresh-driven development (RDD). Either way you find yourself with a [...]

I’m just back from a fantastic time in Wellington, New Zealand, where I was doing some Grails training and speaking duties for Asia/Pacific User Group of SunGardHE. Wellington is a very beautiful place (albeit a little cold – and I *live* in a cold place!) and the local hosting team of Andrew/Dale/Keiryn where just fantastic in sorting everything out! On the first day I had a chance to speak with around 100 managers on the benefits [...]

I’ve run into this one a few times on Grails 1.3.x, and every time I have to go googling to sort it out – it’s time to write it down to speed up my Google searches! The error I end up with is typically something like: java.lang.LinkageError: loader constraint violation: loader (instance of <bootloader>) previously initiated loading for a different type with name “org/xml/sax/SAXParseException” If you get this on a project after installing a new [...]