In my previous two posts, I described my experience with maintenance and refactoring on a large project that used both Java and Groovy. In this post, I will discuss the installation concerns raised by Bill Burke in his blog post “Polyglot…
A page layout using DIV’s are much more flexible than a table layout. However, I often went back to using tables because it seemed more stable across different browsers. After spending some time researching how to use DIV’s effectively, I came up…
In part 1, I described how my experiences using both Groovy and Java delivered business value to the customer by letting the project team work with code that closely reflected the domain. We found the new system didn’t result in a “maintenance…
My answer to Peter Ledbrooks’s blog post “Are polyglot systems a good idea?” is “Yes!“. He wrote his post after reading “Polyglotism is the worst idea I ever heard ” by Bill Burke. I don’t know Bill Burke personally but the post has a troll-like…
As smart mobile phones such as the iPhone or the Palm Pre offer a better Web-browsing experience, it becomes easier to offer access to enterprise Web applications from these devices. Designing Web content for mobile devices isn’t that much different…
I recently came across this great JavaScript library called TextboxList by Guillermo Rauch which will convert good old input fields into Facebook like input fields. Even though there are tons of JavaScript libraries out there, it is very hard to…
How many times do you find yourself creating this code over and over again in tests or even production code? Rather than writing this same code over and over again, there is an easier way to create a simple generic list of objects in one method…
At my current client I’ve been building a rather complex rich client app using ExtJs. The team has written a lot of JavaScript code, and has been writing a lot of JavaScript unit tests as well. We’ve gone through several unit testing tools along the…
This is a follow on to Eclipse Setup for Grails 1.1 Development . Although not ideal Eclipse integration, by setting up a Run Configuration for your Grails project in Eclipse, you will be able to run and debug Grails integration JUnit tests within…
Overall I have enjoyed the development experience with Grails and I am excited about its future. I am a heavy Eclipse user so along with a number of folks in the community I have been a bit disappointed with the support in my favorite IDE. However…
I gave another presentation today on JavaScript Unit testing tools. This time I’ve advocated the use of HtmlUnit and Screw.Unit in combination. Screw.Unit is a JavaScript testing framework that’s great for unit tests, and HtmlUnit has…
What brought us to Agile? The most common software management technique in the past and today is called “waterfall” Software Development. As defined by Wikipedia, the definition for Waterfall development is a sequential development process, in which…
One frequent hole in Test Driven Development (or any other comprehensive attempt to test) in Java web applications is the presentation layer. Especially when using an MVC pattern to separate the work from the display, the trend is to do that testing…
JavaScript is a nice fit on the Grails platform. This demo/presentation provides a side by side comparison of Ext JS and GrailsUI approaches to building feature rich web applications on Grails. Feel free to look at the presentation slides, as well as…
There are a lot of different ideas, questions, and discussions going around about resumes and cover letters, so I thought I’d jump in the mix. I’ve seen literally tens of thousands of resumes in my day, some terrible, some great. But all are…
My OPI Tech Talk, on the Yucky Parts of Web Development, is available as a Powerpoint presentation . In the talk, I spoke on how a few techniques can give you a jumpstart for the Web side of your applications. The focus was on using these techniques…
An overview of some testing frameworks for full-featured Javascript Libraries JavaScript Testing Presentation Examples: presentation.zip musicmanager.zip Abstract: Making the move from sprinkling simple interactive Ajax controls into basic web…
I’ve been approached recently by members of various projects about how to improve code coverage numbers. In an abuse of the numbers or a misunderstanding of their purpose, there’s mandates to keep code coverage at 80%. Other team’s have been closer…
This presentation discusses some of the fundamental concepts of Grails and dives into an example that demonstrates how to build RESTful Web Services with Grails. Select the link below to download the full presentation. Intro to Grails with RESTful…
For the past several weeks, I’ve been working on a Grails app in my spare time, and I’m really excited about the future of Grails. However, I’ve been a bit disappointed in the tooling currently available. Myself and many of my clients use Eclipse…
Typical Web pages use one or more ways to lay out pages. The most common means are table-based layout and CSS layout. CSS layout means you use CSS styles to place major blocks of your page at certain locations. For example, the footer gets placed at…
In my OPI Tech Talk on Jan 28, 2009 on the Yucky Parts of Web Development, I covered a very simple technique you can use to create mouseover effects for tabular data. If you want to use the small interaction style mentioned in my talk, or if you just…
At my current client, there’s a drive to put more unit tests on the Java code. It’s been a long hard process as few of the developers do strict, or even just “mostly,” test-driven development. As an attempt to try and drive this home, they’ve also…
A Slashdot story pointed out the Windows 7 Beta release was made public, so I downloaded the DVD image, made up a quick VMWare image, and installed the new Windows for play. Sometimes I’d have a spare PC laying around that I’d use as a lab to install…
It happens far too often that developers shortcut creating and in their objects. This discussion hopes to enlighten those short-cutters, and introduce a simple solution to their problem. The use of and is assumptive of only one concern, and…
