Well I shall be ducking below the radar for about 10 days.. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

We (the family) are off on well earned vacation for 10 days, not really a road trip but yes camping.

 We will be based just outside Saumur in the Loire valley, France for 6 days and then moving back up north towards Normandy for the return trip. Unfortunately my search for wifi in the area has been fruitless except for a small hotel outside Saumur. Thus I am likely to remain below the radar for the period, yes I know , 'How will I stand it!'. I'm sure I will cope I always have the K750i which can read some of my feeds but I haven't got the moblogging working yet!!

 I'm stocked up with ITC content on the K750i, some good books : Wisdom of the Crowds, Critical Mass and Tipping point , I know should have read TP ages ago, I get little tree based reading time nowadays...

 But most of all I'm just looking forward to being out in the air and not having to do stuff, good thinking time and family time.. Maybe I should do my first podcast ? on the K750i not sure 8khz mono is good enough though

If you like Java you should get Groovy! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I've been meaning to blog about Groovy for sometime, but I couldn't possibly cover it in one post, thus I may touch on it regularly in the future.

 What is Groovy ? It's a programming language in short, and before you all start yawning and saying here we go again yet another new language, This is a bit different. It's not for everyone but it is definitely good for anyone that knows or uses Java. Why ? because it has been designed to be a great scripting language for Java programmers and to run with and inside of Java.

 It's basic advantage is that it brings the power of scripting languages like Ruby, Python and Perl to the Java platform. It takes a lot of the great features from these languages and places these at your disposal in a Java environment.

 The reason I am blogging about it is because it's changed the way our business works. Historically we used C then Perl/cgi followed by PHP, most of our work had become web based so no suprises here. A few years (about 4) ago we decided we were not reusing our code enough. At this point we looked around at the options and eventually opted to go the Java serverside route using servlets and JSP. Dislike of JSP and seperation of concerns then led us to servlet/XML + CSS pipeline architectures which worked great for our customers base and we acheived our code reuse targets saving money and time etc.. We however began to notice a loss of what we considered 'agility', this happen as we moved away from scripting, although our XML usage enabled scripting via technologies like Jelly, we were still coming up short. At this point we considered python and ruby both off which could be run within the JVM via java ports : Jython and JRuby. Both of these were good but didn't quite cut it, they lost some of the 'Java think'. That is when we discovered Groovy, it really does offer the best of both worlds, a great scripting language and complete Java compatability/coexistence. It has made a real difference to our business as we now have good code reuse and good agility to respond quickly, I would strongly recomend you check it out, particularly since it's JSR which has stabalised the language.

 Next time I will talk about some of the features that aren't even available in other scripting languages that have really helped us.

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