Posted by Erik Pragt around lunchtime: May 4th, 2008
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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Posted by Erik Pragt in the late evening: April 22nd, 2008
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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Posted by Erik Pragt in the late evening: April 10th, 2008
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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Posted by Erik Pragt mid-afternoon: March 12th, 2008
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!
Posted by Erik Pragt in the wee hours: March 7th, 2008
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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Posted by Erik Pragt in the wee hours: January 9th, 2008
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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Posted by Erik Pragt around lunchtime: December 25th, 2007
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.