When the opportunity arises for development of a new application, or the modernization of an old one, the architect is faced with a myriad of often conflicting choices. There are so many choices there’s a significant risk of falling into analysis paralysis or simply defaulting to safe solutions. (“No one ever got fired for choosing…
Tech Talk
Implementing Enterprise Integration Patterns with Apache Camel
April 5th, 2016There may be no harder task than implementing enterprise integrations between disparate systems, including those outside your organization’s control. A set of integration patterns has emerged to help understand common scenarios. Apache Camel implements those patterns, making defining Message routes easy. In a sense, Apache Camel is an inversion of control framework for message routing…
Java 8: A Game Changer
October 6th, 2015Just a few years ago, it looked like Java’s best days were behind it. All the developer “trend setters” seemed to migrating to Ruby, Groovy, Scala, Clojure and even JavaScript. Many Java developers wondered if it was time for them to defect from the Java camp. Then came Java 8. Java 8 introduced many enhancements…
Building a Grails Microservice Federation
September 16th, 2015At the 2015 national SpringOne/2GX conference in Washington, D.C., we presented a talk on the very hot topic of microservice architectures and how Grails apps can play a role in those architectures. Grails developers have long loved Grails as a platform for building robust, albeit monolithic, web applications. Then Grails 2.3 gave us powerful server-side…
Building Beautiful Grails Apps with Twitter Bootstrap
May 28th, 2015Let’s face it: Web application developers generally make poorly designed web applications. Sure they work, but they usually look slightly less than horrible. Don’t even think about getting a responsive app that will look as nice on a tablet as on a beautiful, big monitor. All that changes with the simple addition of Twitter Bootstrap….
Introduction to Groovy (4 Parts + Mini-Workshop)
August 21st, 2014While on a consulting project, we started an internal Groovy user group to help get the Java developers on the same page with Groovy. Out of that came this short series of presentations and a half-day Saturday mini-workshop to review and practice the basics of Groovy. We share it here to help anyone else who…
Leveraging Groovy Goodness with Spring 4.0
July 16th, 2014Anyone working with the Spring framework for any length of time knows what a time saver it can be for managing dependency injections, weaving in some AOP, wrapping complex, low-level APIs with elegant, simple abstractions and more. Now, there’s an easy way to make your Spring beans even simpler to define, declare, and use to…
Introduction to Grails, Part II
June 4th, 2014In Part I of this two-part talk, we introduced Grails. In that talk, we covered the basics of getting started with Grails, dynamic and static scaffolding, and domain class and GORM CRUD basics. For good measure, we also included a few Groovy basics for those coming to Grails without any groovy background. Those were just…
Introduction to Grails, Part I
May 7th, 2014Anyone who has used any of the Java web frameworks like Struts, JavaServer Faces or Spring MVC has a pretty good idea of how web development is done with Java and the Java Servlet API, with or without JSPs. You probably have also used Spring and Hibernate. And maybe a page templating API, like Facelets…
What’s New in Grails 2.3
December 4th, 2013It’s amazing to at how great the Grails web application platform has become over the years. The latest round of significant improvements came with the release of Grails 2.3.0. In this talk, we discuss these new changes and showed code examples illustrating how to leverage them in your projects. Specifically, he covered: The new data…