Xebia Blog

The problem

What if you're working with Maven, where you've got all your dependencies nicely organised, and now you decide to use any other piece of 'classpath-aware' software, like Fitnesse. The chances are that you'll need to use the same classpath in Fitnesse as in Maven. A possible solution could be to maintain it by hand, but why not write a very small script for it to do it for you? My (very very very!) basic solution is to use a Groovy, because it's easy to write, easy to read, and easy to use!
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Filed under: Groovy, Maven, fitnesse
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A thing I was playing with today was many-to-many relationships in Grails to create a Tag Cloud. To create a Tag Cloud, I must have a set of key/value pairs, each with a label and a value of the label, which could look like this:

['Java': 5, 'Grails': 16, 'Groovy': 12]

But to query this, I need to query a many to many relationship and produce the above result. This blog will describe how to do this with HQL, Criteria and the HibernateCriteriaBuilder.
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Filed under: Grails, Groovy, Hibernate, Java
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Grails syntax highlighter plugin

Yesterday, I released my first plugin for Grails. The goal of the plugin is to do Syntax Highlighting for Code Snippets in HTML pages, for which no plugin existed yet. The plugin supports a whole range of languages, and even includes Groovy Highlighting support. The Grails Synax Highlighter builds on the great work of Alex Gorbatchev, who wrote and maintains the Javascript Syntax Highlighter.
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Filed under: Grails, Usability
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Currenttly, I'm in the process of building a Grails application. While I've built several prototypes/quick hacks, this is actually the first 'real' application I'm building. "So", I thought, "if this is a real application, I'm in need of some real tests!". When you're in the normal flow of developing a Grails application, everything goes so fast, you almost forget about writing the tests. So I decided to do it a bit differently, and do it just like in Java: do it TDD!
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Filed under: Grails, Groovy, Java, Testing
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At April the 4th, 2008, we held another one of our quarterly Tech Rallies. A Tech Rally, as the name implies, is a whole day of technical training for the whole Software Development department.

The subject of an ITR can be almost anything, as long as it's technically focused, or related to our work. For example, previous Tech Rallies were about Ruby, Grails, CSS/Javascript/Ajax and Oracle Databases, to name a few. This time, our Tech Rally was about creating the best SCRUM tool ever. Quite a challenge, when you've only got 8 hours, but to give a quick conclusion: the results were very impressive. It's quite challenging to organize an event like this, so to put a bit of focus on the fun and team aspects, the group was divided into smaller groups (of approx. 4 people in size) and could pick the technologies of their liking.
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Filed under: Java
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According to CATB, the act of shaving a Yak is "Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on.".

The first time I read about the term was on this blog, but that was a long time ago. I was only recently that I noticed that a) I was doing it again, and b) some of my collegues where unfamiliar with the term. Therefor, I decided to (also) blog about it.
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Filed under: Agile
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Though concurrency is not really a hobby of mine, but I do find it interesting, and once in a while, it gets me intrigued. This article is about locking, and choosing the right type of lock and what the consequences are when picking the wrong lock!

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Filed under: Concurrency Control, Java, Performance
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JetBrains' IntelliJ is one of the best IDE's out there. With all those features packed into one package, is quite easy to not be aware of all of them. In this blogposting I will demonstrate some of IntelliJ's best hidden features, which will make developing with this IDE even a bigger pleasure!
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Filed under: IntelliJ, Java
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XKE

Tonight, we organized our biweekly XKE (Xebia Knowledge Exchange), which is a forum where we update each other on interesting developments or have discussions on various topics.

One of the topics of tonight was: "what keeps us programming in Java"? The underlying thought about it was: what prevents us from programming in a different language, especially a dynamic language like Ruby on Groovy. Because I'm a little more into Groovy than I am into Ruby, I'll talk the rest of the blog about Groovy, but you can probably exchange it for any (dynamic) language.

One of the key factors (and this might sound like an open door) to stick to programming in Java is that we are all very familiar with the language. We have invested time learning it, we know the frameworks, and we have real experience that it works. Furthermore, people know how to manage a Java application, know how to deploy it on an application server, and as an added bonus, IDE's support Java really well.
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Filed under: Agile, Groovy, Java, Quality Assurance
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Combining Groovy and Java

Everybody refactors (I hope). But what if your standard refactoring just isn’t good enough? Take the next step in refactoring into Groovy code and see how easy it is to integrate Groovy into your existing Java projects.

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Filed under: Groovy, Java, Maven
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