act:ualise | technology

@graemerocher just tweeted about the Nuts Grails plugin which provides web based IDE from within your Grails application. Talk about eating your own dogfood! Here’s some of the key features as listed on the project homepage: Currently code completion is available only for groovy files When user pressed ctrl+space completion suggestions will be shown Variables [...]

For those using Grails 1.1 already there’s a new command line argument for testing which re-runs only tests which previously failed. grails test-app -rerun Thanks to @wangjammer5

Gus Power and Kris Lander of EnergizedWork just presented ‘No Excuses: Concept to Cash Every Week‘ at QCon London which highlights the manner by which development is executed within the EnergizedWork stable.  It’s worth reviewing the slides (available via ‘No Excuses’ link above) to get a sense of how using such methods can help achieve [...]

Following my previous post I discovered a very helpful email in my inbox from Johannes Link, the author of MockMe, who provided an example of using MockMe to unit test my PrototypeJS classes. One of the benefits of MockMe, vs JSMock or Jack, is it’s observance of the 3-A’s pattern (Arrange Act Assert), I quote: [...]

I’ve long been used to having decent testing frameworks in Java / Groovy / Grails however its taken me a while to stumble upon similar ways to test in Javascript. I tried my hand at using JSMock and then tried MockMe. They both seem very capable but I wanted something quick to test a class [...]

Grails gets centre stage for being used by Wired.com in it’s new ‘Product Reviews’ site area.  Needless to say, I was unsurprised by (and in full agreement with) the following statements in the release: Our developers are much happier developing in Grails because they can accomplish tasks so much faster. Grails makes it easier and saves time bringing new [...]

Well who would ever have thought, but according to Google the performance of IE has been proved as slower than even Rhino, the Javascript parser and execution library! It never ceases to amaze me how so much money can be spent on making such a pile of stink!

I have recently been attempting to get my head around Open Flash Chart to, at the very least, get an equivalent ‘Hello World’ version running before I run off customising it. Should be simple right? Well yes, once you get around a real showstopping gotcha which isn’t documented out there. The starting point, this tutorial [...]

In my previous article on performance testing, I suggested that incremental and iterative development of performance unit tests was an essential part of your overall performance testing strategy. However, performance testing the parts of a system is vastly different from testing the whole and will require some careful thinking to avoid too much focus on [...]

I’ve done a lot of performance analysis and improvement in my time although it’s only in my last 3 projects that we started automating it. In all cases a developer check-in would trigger the execution of a battery of stress/concurrency tests against a fully integrated as-live environment. Soak tests were scheduled nightly or over weekends [...]