Kev's Development Toolbox

June 1, 2006

ZDNet: Getting started with the Google Web Toolkit

ZDNet have a quick start guide in Ed Burnette’s blog entry showing you how to get started with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

The GWT was annouced this year at JavaOne and gives Java developers a pure Java approach to developing AJAX applications, by converting the Java code into HTML and Javascript. The GWT gives you a Java API which will be familiar to Java developers, and allows you to develop your app using the provided Java components, and then when ready generate the HTML and Javascript representation of the app with AJAX functionality. This is an awesome approach to avoiding Javascript development, which is hard to debug and develop (in comparison with Java and the rich IDE tools available).

May 31, 2006

First solid state notebook – Samsung Q30

The Samsung Q30 is the first solid-state notebook, using flash memory in place of a harddrive. The initial model has a 32GB solid state drive, which allows Windows to boot in half the time of traditional moving part harddrives.

I’m surprised its not faster than this, but its an interesting step in what I think is the right direction. How long will it now take before we get to an ‘instant on’ notebook?

May 31, 2006

Reg Developer: Interview with Jim Gray

Reg Developer have an iinterview with Jim Gray on their site, well known for his work on database theory in the 1970s, and currently working with Microsoft as manager of Microsoft Research’s eSciences group at the Bay Area Research Center (BARC) in San Francisco.

The interview covers transactions, using parallel processors such as GPUs for intensive processing, and why developers have a hard time adapting to thinking of problems in terms of parallel processing.

May 30, 2006

Continuing adventures with Grails – now we’re getting Groovy

I had a few hours this weekend to continue investigating the possibility of using of using Grails and Groovy to implement a solution for a client, and I’ve learnt enough at this point so say for this project I am committed to using Grails.

I was already liking what I was seeing, but was uncertain early on if this could realy do the job, but now I am sold. It really is Groovy; it is awesome. The productivity gain from using the ‘coding by convention’ approach made popular by Ruby on Rails really is awesome. It is amazing. In comparision with working with multi-layered architectures where as a developer I have to code each indiviidual slice in the application from end to end and then spend just as much time on the configuration to wire them all together – this is amazing. Groovy and Grails are so concise and gets the job done with minimal effort and coding, and yes – minimal if any configuration.

Ok, I learnt a few lessons at the weekend, and came across a couple of issues that I logged with Grails JIRA:

Creating a Grails web app WAR
Deploying a Grails WAR to 4.0.x
Using EJB3.0 entities with the Grails build scripts: the build script needs to include an import statement with the full package name in the generated Controller classes, otherwise the code will not comile next time you run the grails script.
the g:select tag does not generate the correct HTML when working with EJB3.0 entities. For this reason I switched back to using the Groovy implemented domain objects instead, which actually turned out to be a lot more concise.