I’m getting close to my first release of SyncTheMilk, my little Outlook and RememberTheMilk task synchronisation tool. Most of the business logic is done, and I’m starting work on the UI makeover right now.
One of the interesting features of the app is that while the UI is written completely in Java, and all of the core business logic is in Groovy.
One of the things that I truly love about the Groovy community is that we are, on the whole, a bunch of pragmatists. We’re mostly practitioners. We use Groovy where is makes sense, and makes our life simpler, and drop back to Java when it doesn’t.
For SyncTheMilk, the business logic does tons of xml/http to the RTM API service (XmlSlurper rocks so hard!), a little bit of Crypto, lot of work with the Outlook COM model (via Scriptom), and has pluggable Sync drivers, so I should, in theory, be able to Sync RememberTheMilk to just about anything!
Groovy makes all of those things simple, so it made sense to write all of the Business Logic in Groovy. But when it came to the UI, I’ve found I’m much more productive with some sort of visual designer, so SWT Designer just made so much sense. (FD: I have a free copy, it’s not cheap but it is just amazing)
Anyways, will have something to show in a couple of weeks. Planning on a free version and a pro version to raise a little money for charity. Not sure if there are other Commercial Groovy desktop apps out there… Should be an interesting experiment!