Grok Programming

eWeek has an interesting article on Groovy’s rise in the ranks of programming languages.

“Groovy now ranks 31 on the list of top programming languages, according to Davis and data from the TIOBE Software BV. Groovy had cracked the top 100 six months ago, moving from 103 to 52, and jumped to its current position in a January poll.“

It is fantastic to see Groovy getting some real positive attention I can only hope that will spur people to more work on the Groovy Eclipse plugin.

One of the questions one of my friends asked in a comment on another posting was, “So, if you could recommend only 1 technical book I get through this year, which one would it be?” I read way too many books. In fact, my doctor says if I don’t stop I’ll turn into a nerd. I’m willing to risk it. Anyway, I’m far from one to shrink away from such a vague and wide ranging question. These aren’t book reviews but simply a few of the reasons I think the book is pretty good or where it could be better. So in no specific order here they are…. Continue Reading »

On the project that I’m working on we reached a point where we needed to integration test the major component that we are building. We already have unit tests with good code coverage for each of the individual pieces. Call me crazy but I wanted to ensure the whole work flow, well, worked. Correctly. You know, test the fact that all these little units happily working in unison would produce output that would make sure everyone on the project team stayed employed. I also wanted a way to run these test in a more or less automated fashion so developers wouldn’t have to remember to do it. To that end the project team started taking a look at Fit and FitNess to see if that would do what we wanted. Both are useless. Continue Reading »

One of my pet peeves lately is software developers who believe that simply reading a book makes them an expert at some aspect of delivering working applications. You know the type of person that has just finished Agile Web Development with Rails is now selling themselves as a “Rails expert”. They aren’t. Let’s take a look at what you really have to do to “know” anything.
Continue Reading »

I’ve been an Eclipse user since somewhere around 2002 and one of the things that has really annoyed me over all of that time is how hands on managing the IDE’s environment has been. I dreaded having to switch out computers or start all over with Eclipse when I changed jobs. It was back to the find and install plugin mambo each and every time. It appears that there are some new tools on the horizon that are trying to help developers in just this situation. Each of them tries to ease the developers life a little bit by taking away the pain and agony of setting up Eclipse.

Continue Reading »

Martin Fowler on his bliki (part blog, part wiki) has a new entry about the ongoing debate about using Groovy or JRuby on the Java VM. I really don’t have a problem with anything he wrote there. I agree that both languages are interesting and worth developers getting to know and that Ruby probably has the edge on where things are going in the future. But one of the largest driving factors as to why a development team might choose either Groovy or JRuby wasn’t covered at all. So with apologies to both Martin Fowler and Ronald Reagan (not that I think he’s particularly upset with my hijacking of one of his more famous lines) I’d like to make my small addition.

Continue Reading »

ThoughtWorks has put out its first podcast covering Domain Specific Languages. The presentation and audio quality is bit rough but the content is interesting and well worth the listen.

Neal Ford, the guy directly responsible for my career (yes, all legal claims need to go his direction), has on his Meme Agora blog, numerous conference keynotes, and various podcasts has pushed forth the idea of Polyglot Programming. The basic idea behind Polyglot Programming is that various aspects of a computer program could be written in multiple implementation languages that target a specific platform. More specifically think of all the computer languages that all run on top of Java’s VM and choosing a few from that set for your application and you’ve got the idea. You would choose what to use based on what language could most easily solve the problems related to a specific aspect of the application. For example, on a JEE web application you might write the view in Ruby on Rails running on JRuby, implement the controller layer in Groovy code in Spring, and use plain ole Java for the model because you have 90% of it already written for a previous application.

Continue Reading »