Well.. maybe not “move the earth”… but I might just be able to come up with a pretty nice little sample blog app. My goal is to have something to add to the Grails samples distro so that people have a nice, gentle, but complete app to cut their teeth on. The humble blog app seems to be low handing fruit, (some people have already started work on such beasts) so I’m off and running [...]

After GrailsExchange, I put it on my TODO list to checkout IntelliJ. Some of the guys were demoing certain features of the JetGroovy plugin and some of the Grails support looked just stunning. So I downloaded the trial, installed the JetGroovy plugin, and created a new Grails app. I’m a hardcore Eclipse user, and have never used Idea before, but the learning curve is pretty nice. So what about the Groovy/Grails stuff? I’m only a [...]

For those who have been chasing the source to the Browser Thumbnail stuff, it’s now available for download (Apache 2.0 license). It’s a little scrappy and needs a tidy up, but we’re all friends, right? At the same place you’ll find the updated source for groovyblogs that will play nice with Grails 1.0 RC1. This version now makes plenty of use of the way-cool Grails Config stuff, so it should be a lot easier to [...]

While testing out my little browser thumbnail service, I thought I’d throw together a little thumbnail Swing client to tinker with (I was super inspired by Geertjan’s work on Soap clients). You can type in a URL, invoke the Thumbnail service over XMLRPC, then have a look at the image returned: If you’re keen for a play, download the latest XML RPC jar (I’m using v0.3), and copy it to your ~/.groovy/lib directory (or %USERPROFILE%.groovylib [...]

Those of you that came to my Grails Exchange talk (slides) will know that I’ve been working hard on a strategy for Browser Thumbnail generation. Well I’ve finally got one that works *fairly* reliably. I took the opportunity to upgrade groovyblogs to Grails 1.0 RC1 at the same time. I’ve tried a few approaches to thumbnails with various Swing libraries, but found the best results came from using the SWT Browser component. This component wraps [...]