act:ualise | technology

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 [...]

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 [...]

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)

@graemerocher just tweeted about the Nuts Grails plugin which provides web based IDE from within your Grails application. Talk about eating

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 the [...]

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 developers onto [...]

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 against [...]