act:ualise | technology

Hands down the coolest thing I have seen in weeks. Who will deliver this first, Apple or Google? Either way, can we have the 21st century now please… i’m seeing a dusty film forming on my mouse at this moment.
(Original article, by @fastcompany)

I recently figured out how to use WebTest for functional testing of Grails controller actions that render JSON. That said, I’m not convinced it’s the best way – I’m fairly sure the gFunc plugin would do it nicely, though I ran into problems with it clean compiling the whole app on every run.
Custom steps
It’s been [...]

Two recently released books I’m working through are Grails In Action and Unlocking Android, both published by Manning.
Notwithstanding the unusual covers, these are very handy, intermediate level books for their respective focuses which I’ve found useful for reference and learning.
Reviews for these books are plenty (GIA, UA) saving me the trouble, though it’s worth mentioning [...]

The hype that surrounded Wolfram Alpha bore similarities to the Segway hype machine of 7 years ago: not for the first time was the media abuzz with promises of a revolution in some small part of our lives, that hackneyed ‘paradigm shift’; the ‘game changer’.
Some weeks later, the news that their traffic levels have plummeted [...]

The No Fluff, Just Stuff 2009 Tour rolls into Seattle on September 18-20th. The line-up has some interesting speakers:

Brian Goetz, Author of Java Concurrency in Practice
Brian Sletten, REST Expert
David Geary, Author of Graphic Java and co-author of Core JSF
Howard Lewis Ship, Creator of Tapestry and HiveMind
Ken Sipe, Technology Director, Perficient, Inc. (PRFT)
Mark Richards, SOA and [...]

Grails comes with HSQLDB as it’s in-memory db and it’s not difficult to inspect it, but there’s a simpler way than many realise and it’s built into every Grails installation, bundled in the HSQLDB jar lib.
I have found this trick is useful when inspecting DB state during integration test execution.
Just add the following line of [...]

There isn’t much more to say than Flickr, ur doin it right! Respect..
The way that metrics are being used for the continual feedback and ongoing health and monitoring of system and features is very Lean and not something I get to see too often.
10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr

View more Microsoft [...]

A fun post by our friend Ivanka who recently joined Canonical to head up the User Experience side, a role which will no doubt prove challenging but has huge potential. Those who’ve already used Ubuntu, myself included, have something of a love/hate relationship with it; likely this is because we hardcore techies are no longer their [...]

Spring has sprung and with that hails the first Vancouver Groovy and Grails meet of the year.
Time:
Monday 30th March, 18:00
Place:
WorkSpace @ 21 Water Street in Gastown, #400
Topics under the spotlight this time round are twofold:

EasyB: BDD For Groovy & Grails (Jerome Pimmel)

EasyB leverages the Groovy language with a simple readable DSL for writing BDD [...]

If you like statistics and Grails you will be pleased to know that Grails is trending higher in searches than Spring Framework since mid-2008.
Check out this Google Trends graph. (thanks @schmichri)