Bill Gloff

I wanted to remind everyone that in one week from today, the Chicago Groovy User Group will have its inaugural meeting in the Chicago Loop. The featured speaker will be Sten Anderson from CITYTECH who will give a talk on using Groovy to create DSL’s. There will be free food and drinks available and a book raffle provided by CITYTECH. Please visit http://cgug.org for more information and to sign up for future notifications.

We have some cool ideas planned for upcoming meetings. Besides having nationally recognized speakers and authors stop by, we are also working on some informal code camps, as well as Lightning Talks where attendees will bring up their Grails related problem that we’ll discuss and solve as a group.

I am excited and looking forward to a great new year. And, what’s a better way than to start off by joining a new user group that’s focused on a great language and platform.

NFJS 2008 is in the bag. This years conference was pretty good overall. The sessions that are standing out for me more than others are Neal Ford’s “Test Driven Design” and his “Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages”. Both gave great tips on how to use dynamic languages to their fullest potential and just because you can code something one way in Java (e.g. maybe follow a design pattern such as the Strategy Pattern) does not mean you should code it in the same way in JRuby or Groovy since you often do not need to go to the same extent in adding more structure to your OO design as you would if you were using a dynamic language. Maybe in a future post I can elaborate more on that and give some examples.

Some other sessions I noted were Jeff Browns’ talk on Groovy and TDD and Andy Glover’s talks on Hudson CI and BDD using easyB. Hudson CI has come some ways since I last used it and was surprised by the number of useful plugins available for it. It’s reminding me of a similiar battle in the IDE wars where Eclipse has a ton of plugins for it (like Hudson) but then you have Cruise (Thoughtworks) or TeamCity (IntelliJ) where the community is not as big so the company gives you more out of the box. It will be interesting to see this play out.

 Then Andy Glover made me believe that easyB is the future of TDD as it makes it easier for the more non-technical folks in your organization be able to read your test cases and know whether or not something was coded to spec. I also think it will make doing test first design and development easier on the developer since it allows you to write out the requirement in English and write some code right next to it. After the tests are executed, a nice report gets created describing each test and whether it passed or failed.

I ended the conference by attending Stuart Halloway’s Java.NEXT talk. Let me just say that I really wished this would have been earlier in the day as it was a lot to digest. He talked about how Java the language is dead and that we should be making the shift over to functional langauges such as Scala and his favorite Clojure. If you cannot make this jump now, then at least start using Groovy or JRuby so you can start preparing yourself for the future. One eye opener for me was watching him transform an Ant XML build file that was about 30 lines of XML into a more readable Clojure script that was about 5 or so lines long and was more powerful than Ant could ever hope to be. Cool stuff!

It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving so you know what that means? NFJS is back in town. This year will be my third straight year in going and we’ll also have about ten of us from CITYTECH attending. It should be a fun weekend geeking out and hopefully learning some new and cool things. Last year’s conference really opened my eyes about Groovy and JRuby so I wonder what this year will bring.

For today’s sessions I am currently planning on attending Neal Ford’s TDD presentation, then either Design Patterns Reconsidered by Alex Miller or Techniques 2008 by Jared Richardson….hmmmm tough choice there. For the last set of sessions for the day (which leads into the keynote) Improving Code Quality by Nathaniel Schutta looks interesting to me since I believe everyone can improve in that area….yes even me.

I’ll give an update later on the ones I ended up going to and what I learned from them. We’re also talking about meeting up at the hotel lounge after the keynote dinner to compare notes and do some networking….stop by if you’re there!

We consultants here at CITYTECH having been getting more and more into Groovy and Grails lately and the number of projects are growing. All of us here are also excited about the news that G2One was acquired by SpringSource as it will help us show that Groovy/Grails is a bonifide langauge and web framework that can be taken seriously in the enterprise.

So this brings me to the main reason for this blog post. It seems like Groovy and Grails is becoming very popular with the aforementioned acquisition, the recent release of a Groovy/Grails specific magazine, and the list of user groups is growing on http://grails.org/Community.

A few of us were surprised to not see a user group for Chicago so we went ahead and formed one: Chicago Groovy User Group. Our first meeting will be in January 2009 with the location being in the loop. More details are coming soon, so please visit the website and register your name and email so we can contact you when more info is posted. If you’re interested in speaking about a Groovy or Grails topic, or if you have any other questions, please contact info@cgug.org for more information.

Pass the word around and let’s get groovy!

I just wanted to write up a quick note about an issue I recently had regarding looking up a JNDI resource from another Seam webapp in JBoss 4.2. I installed Day CRX as a war into a development JBoss server and followed all the directions that were given from Day’s documentation including changing the Java2ClassLoadingCompliance property to true in the /server/default/deploy/jbossweb-tomcat55.sar/META-INF/jboss-service.xml configuration file. According to Day “this is required to enable JNDI lookups of the CRX repository between webapps. The default for this attribute is false.”

After completing all the steps, I still could not do a lookup on that name (crx) as I would continously receive NameNotFoundExceptions no matter what I tried. At first I thought maybe my spring configuration was wrong, but I then noticed that Spring was finding it, and saw that the MemoryInitialContextFactory that Day uses was the one throwing the error. I was puzzled to say the least, but realized it had to be some kind of classloading issue.

To wrap this up, I finally got everything to work by doing two things. First I had to put the crx-shared-1.4.0.jar and the jcr-1.0.jar into the server/lib/endorsed folder and not the server/lib like the documenation stated. The other piece to this is Seam overwrites the Java2ClassLoadingCompliance property in a file called WEB-INF/jboss-web.xml and sets it to false. I ended up changing that to true and everything started to work.

If you know a reason why I shouldn’t do what I did or you know another way to get a successful JNDI lookup without having to set Java2ClassLoadingCompliance to true, then please let me know.

Technorati Tags: jboss, seam, day, crx

Chicago’s local Rails User Group (Chicago Ruby) is putting together a one day mini conference called WindyCityRails on Saturday September 20, 2008 from 8am - 4pm. Entry fee is pretty cheap at $99 (beakfast, lunch and snacks also included) and looks like it will be well worth it. If you’re in or around Chicago and into Rails, sign up here.

Sporting a new design for their website, the Grails team today announced that Grails 1.0 has been officially released. A lot of excitement is building up around Groovy and its counterpart web framework Grails these days and I see why as its fun to use and you become way more productive as a developer. Grails takes a lot of cues from Ruby on Rails but also gives the ability to leverage your existing Java knowledge and JEE environment.

But don’t just take my word for it though, try it out for yourself.

Read the announcement and release notes here http://grails.org/1.0+Release+Notes and go build yourself a new web application.

Yesterday I attended FlexCamp Chicago. It’s a one day mini conference on Adobe Flex. Most of the speakers were from Digital Primates. They’re the authors of the book “Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source“.

Here’s a breakdown of the presentations (50 min each) that were given and my comments:

• Keynote - Your usual 10,000 ft view of the Flex Platform.
• Building Your First Flex App - Pretty basic guided tutorial, but a good place to start just to get everyone on the same page.
• Taking a Flex App to the Desktop - When was the last time you developed a sophisticated web application and transformed it into a desktop application by changing only one line of code?
• Building Flex Components - Maybe the component market place that was supposed to happen with Java will take off with Flex….we’ll have to wait and see.
• Integrating Flex with ColdFusion - Anyone still use ColdFusion? Adobe does provide tight and useful integration between CF and Flex which does make doing some things on the server side quite easy.
• Integrating Flex with Java - Good presentation but it would have been cool to get deeper into it. Too bad for me most of the audience wasn’t familiar with Java.

My overall impression of the mini conference was quite good, especially when it only costs $20. For that $20, you get the aforementioned book, a nice t-shirt, a continental breakfast, and a sandwich & chips lunch from Corner Bakery. Not a bad deal at all. Only complaints would be that the seats became uncomfortable after a short time, and there was no desk to set your stuff on; like a laptop and such. They did provide adequate breaks though to stretch your legs.

If the topics changed, I would consider going back as especially if I wanted easy access to some Flex experts as they were all more than willing to answer any type of question. Thier enthusiam for Flex was quite high and it rubs off, of course. This is some unbelievable stuff, and my imagination is starting to run wild thinking about all the different possibilities Flex offers. As Flex 3 is about to be released soon, I was wondering if anyone is starting to see more of a demand for Flex based applications in 2008?

I just got back from Boston last Friday as I attended the Shared Insights: Portals, Collaboration & Content Conference. It was a small conference (around 150-200 people) that extended over 4 days. Although it was small, it was quite informative with some really good speakers (especially Zach Wahl & Dale Tuttle from a company called Project Performance Corporation).

Overall there were three tracks that focused on Portal Implementation, Content, and Collaboration. One tidbit that I learned from Colin White (BI Research) was that Portals can be broken down into 3 high level categories 1) Transactional 2) Business Intelligence and 3) Collaboration. The collaboration topics had a lot of interest since most of these presented ideas on how to integrate WEB 2.0 mediums into the enterprise. More thoughts on that later.

The other topics were more related to either taxonomies and metadata, BI, search analytics, and document management. The 168 & 170 JSR’s were of course mentioned a lot since those deal with portlets and repositories.

While we were at the conference we got a chance to meet some very nice people from Day where they and McDonalds together won the Shared Insights 2006 Portal Excellence Award. The press release can be found here. Speaking of Day, did you know that CityTech just became a Day partner? If you’re in the need for Day CMS integration, contact us to find out how we might be able to help.

There were a good number of case studies (e.g. Aflac showed off a nice portal running on AquaLogic User Interaction ALUI (formerly PlumTree Portal) ) that proved you can have a successful enterprise portal with some hard work and careful planning. In fact a lot of the nicer portals I saw showcased were built using ALUI (so much so I might start playing around with it to see it for myself), even though there was one nice one built using WebLogic Portal that Family Dollar presented.

One of the key messages in most of the talks was think big, but start small. This turns out to be true for not only portal development but also for a lot of things such as building a SOA as its easier to get started building from the bottom up. It would be ideal to take more of a top down approach but more times than not, people get intimidated by all the challenges and the complexity of doing such a thing. Better to start small and work out the kinks before going full force when taking the next step.

So, if you’re involved in a enterprise portal project, I would recommend going to a conference like this as it allows for great networking, and exchanging of ideas. Also it’s nice to meet other people trying to accomplish the same things you are.

We did manage to go out and do some exploring of Boston though…

CityTech guys (from left: Satish, Matt, me, and Shane) being tourists

Welcome to my blog! As a senior software consultant (for Citytech, Inc.) in the Windy City, I come across a lot of things that I’m looking forward to sharing with the technically inclined community. I’m very passionate about technology so it should pretty easy to present some useful information as well as some insight to technology current events, new languages and frameworks, and personal experiences that I endure on a daily basis. Stay with me, and I will hopefully make it worth your while!