Boy that 20 hours certainly went more quickly than expected… Actually SlimTimer is telling me that I’m at 21.3 hours, so it’s definitely time for pens down! I’ll factor in the final cleanup and deploy time to get a more accurate final figure for the go-live. Tons of new features made it into the final release, though. Lets start with the more boring webby stuff, since that’s all part of the development deal too, and [...]

Just back from a week at the beach on hols and feeling fantastic. I must say that progress has been a lot slower in the second set of 7 hours but I’m still pretty on track for my 20 hour deadline. SlimTimer is reporting 14.8 hours on the clock, so I figure it must be time for an update. RSS and Atom generation of “Recent Entries” is in and happening. Here’s a grab from Newzcrawler [...]

Ok. Creeping up on 6.7 hours working on my Grails-based Groovy Blog Aggregator and it’s time for an update on what’s done so far. Ok. Quite a lot is in: Account creation, forgotten password Adding a single blog feed to your account (with ajax test/preview) RSS and Atom parsing of feeds using Rome Scheduled updating of all registered feeds (checking for new entries) “Recent Entries” page with basic description summary taglib Hit counting and redirection [...]

So how much of a Community-driven Website could you build in 20 hours, once you’ve got a good feel for the framework? That’s my February Grails challenge… I reckon I can find about 5 hours of “project” time a week (think wife/kids/dog/dayjob/uni/health – so 5 hours might be optimistic). I’m really keen to see what I could build in that timeframe over the course of February that would be useful to the Groovy and Grails [...]

That’s right. Grails apps now play nice on Glassfish v1. Graham has been very patient about my regular nagging over GRAILS-269 , and true to his word, the new Grails 0.4 will indeed be Glassfish friendly. This is sensational news for me, since I have been busting to run a few of my apps publicly for a while and had to resort to all sorts of dodgy workarounds getting Grails running on Jetty while the [...]

There’s been a some talk on the Grails list from different folk that are having a go at implementing a fulltext Search for their Grails application. Maurice has done a sensational job with integrating Compass, and looks like a fantastic platform for a future integrated Grails search capability. Recently I’ve been using raw Lucene, and I have my hit hitlighting happening (including … ellipses for joining multiple hits in a single document), along with some [...]

I’m currently working on a little Grails bug tracking application which should see the light of day on Sourceforge sometime in the new year. One of the features I just love about Jira is the RSS support – I’m always watching the Grails recently closed issues to see what’s been fixed in the SVN. So I decided to see what’s involved in generating a feed. I could use the standard Groovy MarkupBuilder for sure, but then [...]

I figured something must be up when I saw that 31 outstanding bugs were fixed in the last 24 hours, then Graeme made the annoucement that Grails 0.3 was released and available for download. If you’ve been on the sidelines waiting to check out Grails, now is an excellent time. There have been enormous functionality enhancements in 0.3 (particularly in GORM – the ORM stuff – which is now *so* cool), the documentation is just fantastic, and [...]

I’ll be giving a presentation tomorrow night at our Canberra Java User Group titled "Impatient Web Development with Grails".  If you’re nearby, it’s gonna be a great night. Thanks to the generous guys at Jetbrains, we’re also giving away a copy of the IntelliJ IDEA 6.0 and TeamCity to one lucky attendee.  And we’re also grateful that the dudes from Sun and Borland will be putting on Beer and Pizza. You guys rock! Should be a sensational [...]

When I found out that Confluence has an XMLRPC interface, and the Groovy had an XMLRPC module, I started to think of a very simple way to make sure people remember when they’re rostered on Morning Tea. My criteria for the app was "What’s the simplest thing that could possible work?" I figured a morning tea page on the Wiki, with a table of dates and names. My script is cronned to run once a [...]