Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
If you’re interested in taking a look at Ruby and Ruby on Rails but haven’t yet downloaded the frameworks or development tools, then the Rails Live CD is an awesome idea to get you started quickly.
Rails Live CD is a bootable Linux distro that contains all the tools you’ll need to get you started, without you having to install or configure a thing. This is well worth a look if the only thing putting you off so far has been to download and install the tools.
The JavaPosse recently had a roundtable discussion involving people connected with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) – Robert Hanson, who works with the GWT Widget Library, Bruce Johnson, the Tech Lead of the GWT project, and Ryan Dewsbury, developer of the GPokr.com site (which is implemented using GWT).
The podcast is worth a listen to get some background information about the development of GWT and it’s usage, and how it has been used on projects so far.
JBoss have released Hibernate 3.2, which is now fully compliant with the JPA spec.
Using Hibernate Annotations, O/R mappings can now be declared using EJB3.0 style annotations inline in the Java classes, instead of (or together with) the previous approach of XML based mapping files.
Grails has been getting a lot of positive feedback so far – see some of the links to developer’s comments on Graeme Rocher’s site here.
From my own experience, it really has blown me away how quick it is to get an app up and running, at least through the prototype stages to get a functional app that people can look at. This goes a huge distance to helping people visualize the app and shape the requirements of what the app should do. It really has opened my eyes as to how much time we spend developing Java web applications messing with the ‘plumbing’, configuration and infrastructure parts of the application, before we even get to developing the part that counts, the actual functionality of the application itself.
I’m still working on a Online Store web application in Grails, and I’m hoping when I’m finished to have it hosted as an open source project so people can download it and take a look at a non-trivial application in Grails. The real benefit though is not in the implementation itself, but how fast and easy it was to get 80% of the application complete (I say 80%, because I’m finding now that I’m stuck refining the app to get it to do exactly as the customer wants, and it’s this last piece to polish it up that has actually taken the most time (but mostly because I’m not a HTML/CSS UI expert).