I’m marching through a pretty large groovyblogs refactor, with the goal of tidying up the codebase considerably. I’ve made a move to the JSecurity plugin so I can add a “remember me” feature, which paves the way for more a more sophisticated “preferences” subsystem down the track. The only problem was that I already has an Account table which contained passwords (base64 sha1) and a role column (string). I really wanted JSecurity to use my [...]

Since being given an ipod touch, I’ve been keen to explore the issues with designing for iphone web apps. With Grails In Action in final copy edits, I’ve finally got some free time to invest in a big refactor of groovyblogs. I’ve already reworked the security system to use JSecurity, moved all the custom search logic over to Searchable, and fixed the dread “numerous repost” problems when people mess with their feedburner/blog software/etc. It’s now [...]

It’s been a hundred years since I last blogged, but I’m now officially “back on the horse” for blogging in ’09. The reason is that Grails In Action has gone into copy and technical edits, so I have most of my life back! If you’re keen to get a feel for what Grails can do, go grab the sample chapter to learn Grails in a hurry! We’re on track to have the final one available [...]

I’ve been hard at work finishing the Controller chapter for San Gria and wanted to come up with fun and practical encoders example. Our main example app for hubbub is a twitter clone, and as I was working on the UI, and I was thinking “I wonder if we could add a TinyUrl facility? Actually, how about a TinyUrlCodec? Could probably do it in a one-liner, right?” class TinyUrlCodec { static encode = { fullUrl [...]

I’m working on the chapter on Messaging and Scheduling for San Gria (Chapter 14), and I’ve finally had a chance to explore some parts of the sensational Grails Quartz plugin that have been on my to-do list for ages. I’ve had a good explore of non-re-entrant jobs, passing state between jobs, programmatically dealing with jobs, and now I’m having a look at the db-persistent jobs. One thing that I’ve wanted to explore for the longest [...]

For those of you wondering how Grails in Action is progressing, the answer is… great! I’ve been sick for the last month with pneumonia which, as you can imagine, has slowed things down a little my end . The good news is that we’re on track for a 2/3 review next month which should see a whole bunch of new chapters out in the wild. I’ve finished the one on messaging and scheduling, Peter has [...]

For the Messaging chapter in San Gria, I needed a good example for our Twitter clone, hubbub. The one I ended up with was a simple Jabber gateway. You can send messages from your jabber client directly to your hubbub account, and they’ll become part of your Post history. Here’s the beast in action. Sent from a Spark jabber client in the foreground to the hubbub webapp running in the backend: The Jabber gateway listens [...]

Thanks so much to everyone who participated in the first annual groovyawards. It was awesome to have so much positive feedback by and for so many of the Groovy and Grails community. For posterity, here’s the final nomation tagcloud: Congratulations to everyone who was nominated for an award. For the next phase we have circulated the final names around a group of Groovy and Grails luminaries for their input. We are hoping to announce the [...]

Peter and I have been working hard on Grails in Action, and we’re tracking pretty well. We’re nearly 200 pages in, and for a couple of amateur authors (and in my case, amateur Grails developer!), we’re doing ok! But I think you’re probably more interested in what’s out there so far. Here’s the short summary: Chapter 1. Grails Quickstart. In our intro chapter, you get a very fast-paced intro into all of the core parts [...]

Just a quick note to say the source code for groovy awards is now on github under an Apache2 license. Go forth and clone! It’s a tiny app – sans plugins – so you should be able to get your head around it by a quick browse of the NominateController. When I get a bit more downtime I’ll write up some of the trickier bits. I’m particularly happy about is how the browse page highlights [...]