Grailscrowd: open invitation

I've mentioned this idea before. I think it would be a great idea to design and develop a Grails community site similar to WorkingWithRails , which I think is great. So, whoever is interested in joining grailscrowd.com project (will be built with Grails, of course), you are more than welcome to contact me.

Later...

Grails is gaining velocity

Now that Grails 0.6 is out with a development speed improvements and bunch of new and exciting features i.e. a DSL for Spring Web Flow, Joint Java/Groovy compiler, better REST support, etc., and the focus of the Grails team is now shifted towards getting 1.0 out of the door, it's time again for me to allocate some time for some serious hacking of the Grails "side projects"

My tiny "web 2.0" project I mentioned about several times in the past, is kind of on hold now, pending the web UI design phase, which is going very slowly at the moment.

I hope to pick up the speed on the development of the Grails Camelot again.

And I am also seriously thinking of creating a networking site for the Grails community with developer's profiles, sites built with Grails, Grails projects, etc. i.e. grailscrowd.com. If anyone is interested in this idea, just let me know :-)

So many things to do, so little time (plus I have a 8.5 months old daughter who needs constant attention at this stage of her life) :-)

Later...

Groovy to the rescue

Last week, out of the blue, I was tasked with coming up with an automation of integration of two systems. I was given a week to complete it and bunch of words like "...this is an emergency project", "it needs to be done ASAP", "this is coming from the higher management and this is very important for us", etc., the usual corporate B.S.

I was so tired of "fighting" this corporate politics nonsense, so I just got right to it.

The problem turned out to be quite simple. I needed to automate the daily feed of the photos (jpg files) of the students that our main photo department takes, from their "photo server" (NT, MS SQL Server to keep student's records) to our main class rosters and grading web based system (Spring web app deployed on Solaris).

I didn't think twice and chose Groovy to do the job. The simple script does query the SQL Server, iterates over the result set, renames the jpeg files (according to the naming scheme required by rosters app) and SFTPes them to the Solaris box.

Using GroovySQL and AntBuilder, it turned out to be a very elegant, expressive and tiny solution. It was done in a couple of days and the script is now doing its job in production!

Conclusion: I love Groovy! :-)

Later...