This question was raised and discussed at stackoverflow recently. Having used Grails for the sixbee project I shared our experiences compared to standard J2EE application development, especially to the subquestion:
Does it really confer rapid development benefits?
Definitely, it does. Even if the scaffolding path is left early and conventions are overriden to the own needs, the start-up period is very short, as we don’t have to care for many different technologies. That kind of lightweightness makes us work not only faster, but also more precise and clean. >> more…
This is a short article I write because it would have saved me some significant time had I been able to google it (no time-travel google (yet) – find articles you will write in the future). So maybe somebody in the future will find this useful 
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What we were doing is to use a Microsoft Business Intelligence/Reporting Server to report on data in an Oracle production database.
Creating the OLAP cubes in the MS system, everything worked fine until I tried to pull in aggregate data over a date field from the database, giving me the mysterious “Not a legal OleAut date” error message that can be found in the various forums, but none in the context of OLAP cubes. >> more…
It can happen more quickly than you think… even in environments which seem to follow an architectural role model, some dusty corners remain.
We are running an MS SQL Server Reporting Services server for some internal reports on the Oracle production database. Nice enough report generator. Now, I have done more than just some MS Access in prehistoric times, and constantly feel reminded of that “put these 120 line SQL query into the puny little properties textbox and it will do what you want” type of development. Things have definitely improved over that with MS Visual Studio 2008 and the report designer, but then, without prior notice, I was struggling with Visual Basic… >> more…
Last week we implemented a small but very interesting CAFM module Cleaning Controls using a digital pen and paper solution.
The digital pen has a mini processor, memory, and a built-in infrared camera. With that pen you can write on normal paper, which was previously printed with the cleaning control form which has a very fine grid pattern in the background, so the pen knows exactly where and what you are writing (ICR technique).
When you have completed the control form, the written data can then be transferred directly to a third-party data server, via mobile phone (Bluetooth) or PC (USB). Of course you can correct/update your text as often as required. >> more…
Although it may seem to be obvious for experienced web page authors, it was a discovery for me: XHTML does not understand special symbols “&” and “<” if written directly. So it’s impossible for example to perform “and” operation (&&) in javascript on the page.
There are two solutions for that:
1) Use CDATA for such sections of data, f.e.
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<script type="text/javascript">
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//< ![CDATA[
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function enableDisableRegisterButton(element1, element2) {
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registerButtonWrapper.disabled = !(element1.checked && element2.checked);
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...
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}
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]]>
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</script>
>> more…
When we are editing web pages in our favourite IDE we expect that it will provide code completion support for all tags and their attributes we use. It is true for plain HTML pages as well as for JSPs and of course XHTMLs. How does code completion works? Very simple: we need to include tag library in page template and that’s it! IDE should analyze this tag library and use tag metadata to provide code completion for page author automatically. Of course tag library should contain all neccessary information for tags, their attributes, functions, etc.
When we create tag library for JSP everything is straightforward: tag library schema support all this information. So we simply create something like that: >> more…
This blog entry opens a series of short articles describing my studying of facelets and attempts to apply it in our platform.
Problem using JSF with JSPs.
First of all, why does our platform need facelets? Currently we are using JSPs with custom JSF tags inside so what’s the problem with combining JSF and JSP? There are lots of good articles related to this topic, so I won’t be repeating their authors. I’ll just briefly sum up main idea.
- JSP’s goal is to produce static and dynamic content based on HTML/scriptlet mixture; technically speaking JSP produces a servlet. JSP page is processed in one pass from top to bottom, with JSP action elements processed in the order in which they appear in the page.
>> more…
http://www.findjar.com
Yep, that’s it. A jar search engine. “Simply enter the name of the class or the JAR file you are looking for and start your search.”
There are more pleasurable things then wading through the fitnesse documentation with its table style, so whenever I don’t remember some fitnesse key word, I’d rather hesitate and wait for an inspiration before going there. This is to memorize the key words to be used in do fixtures.
- show to print out non-boolean values
- check to verify non-boolean values
- reject to invert the logic of the test
Usage like this: >> more…
Next month, we will stop supporting IE6 in conjectPM. This means getting rid of all those “if it’s IE6 add 2 pixels to the y-position”, deleting lots of CSS hacks, throwing away all spezialized stylesheets… we’re already counting the days (great that February s such a short month) and think about having a “hooray, no more IE6!” party.
Or, to cite this month’s ThinkGeek newsletter, “Hearing the news was just like being in high school and getting a pass out of P.E.” (that was about Google stopping IE6 support for Mail and Docs)
