I’ve been incorporating more JavaScript into my Webapps lately, and have finally take some time out to have a look at some Unit Testing options for JavaScript. There’s quite a few solid libraries to look at including JSUnit, YUITest and QUnit (and many more BDD ones emerging), so the whole experience can be a little daunting at the start. For my particularly used case, I wanted something very lightweight and easy to integrate into my [...]

I’ve been doing some work for a Government client around making their cyber-safety info accessible to Aussie kids. One of the target devices is iPhone (actually Android is even higher priority since Android handsets are becoming far more common with kids, but that’s another bunch of excitement altogether). The issue with iPod/iPhone bookmarking is that the Safari Mobile bookmarking icon is so ambiguous that very few people know what it does! We were after a [...]

I’m speaking at the ACT Oracle User Group conference next week on Java EE6. Normally I’d do a talk on Grails to this set (and pump the book of course!), but Peter McNeil had already put a Grails talk together and I was already brimming with other ideas… Anyways, I’ve been doing some client work on JEE6 lately, and I was so inspired by Adam Bien’s live coding talk at JavaOne 2010, I’m going to [...]

The plans for the Groovy and Grails BOF at JavaOne are coming together and it’s gonna be a “full on double rainbow all the way across the sky” experience. “But what does it mean?” Glad you asked. This year we have our most comprehensive panel ever! We’ll have Peter Ledbrook (Grails Evangelist and Grails in Action co-author), Guillaume Laforge (Groovy lead), Andres Almiray (Griffon lead and Griffon in Action author), Dierk Koenig (Groovy in Action [...]

I really have to take a rest from this book review business, but I’ve been buying heaps of books through Tech Books Deal of the Day, and this title has been very useful for one of my current bits of client work. First of all, Beginning Java EE6 with Glassfish 3 came at a time when one of our clients requested we implement some JPA2 infrastructure (around EJB3) for them to store some JAXB objects [...]

The guys over at Packt Press sent us a free copy of Groovy for Domain Specific Languages to review for the Grails Podcast. We’ll talk about it in an upcoming show, but I promised the publisher I’d post some thoughts on my blog, so here we are. First, I’m super excited that there is now a title dedicated purely to Groovy DSLs. Every time I hear Guillaume or Paul talk about DSLs I get swamped [...]

The client brief was pretty straightforward: “We need to persist this class to a Database”. No problem. Hibernate FTW. “Actually, we’d like to use JPA2 to do the heavy lifting”. No problem, we’ll annotate up the domain classes with a few @Entity statements and we’re off. “Oh, and the class we wish to persist is a graph of objects that are dynamically generated via JAXB”. Things are getting a little more complex now. Converting your [...]

Had a fantastic time last night with the guys at my local Canberra JUG giving a presentation titled “NoSQL – Life Beyond the Outer Join”. I’ll embed the slides further down. In the talk we looked at four different types of NoSQL options for Java guys: Simple Key/Value in-memory stores (Memcached), sophisticated distributed key/value stores (Voldemort), Document Databases (CouchDB), and Graph Databases (Neo4j). We also had a play with the common java clients that are [...]

I has recently handed a truckload of client code all developed in Netbeans. In order to get a feel for the interdependencies, I thought I just fire up a clean copy of Netbeans and open it up. Unfortunately, when I tried to open the project I was greeted with the dreaded “unrecognized project; missing plug-in” dialog: Hmnmm… That’s ok, so I thought I’d just open it up as a “free-form” Netbeans project, but that’s no [...]

Next month I’ll be hanging out at my local JUG giving a bit of a survey of the main players in the NoSQL movement along with the Java APIs that they offer. If you’re in or around Canberra on July 14, make sure drop by for a great night of Pizza and Java Geekery with a somewhat schemaless design Will slideshare up the slides, and bitbucket up the source, once I’ve done the presento. Till [...]