I got kind of bored with Flex and all the complexity it introduces by forcing you to switch between ActionScript and whatever you are using for the backend (Groovy in my case). I also got bored with having to regenerate my data service stubs on each server-side change, and having to handle the asynchronous remoting. So I started to have a look at Vaadin.
In many of my posts about Grails and Flex integration, I take for granted that I use Data Transfer Objects to transfer data between my Grails backend and my Flex frontend. Put simply, Data Transfer Object are pure data containing classes different from the domain entity classes used to store data in the backend. I take it for granted because I’m deeply convinced that it’s the best way to do things and so far, experience has never proved me wrong. But I often get this question in comments or by mail (this is for you Martijn): why bother create an entirely separate class structure and copy data from entities to DTO’s and back instead of just using entities?
At the end of the second article in this series, we ended up with a working application but it was not really ready for the real world because it had one major flaw: the URL of the AMF endpoint was hardcoded in the client in such a way that it was impossible to change after compilation and very hard to handle several environments (dev, test, prod). The solution to that problem is to integrate dependency injection into the mix.
Yesterday at Devoxx, Matt Raible did a very interesting talk on comparing JVM web frameworks. On this occasion he had the incredible courage of voicing his opinion on each of the most well-known frameworks, rating them in a matrix and the craziest part: showing this matrix to everyone. Immediately after his talk, Twitter was on
todolist2This is a follow-up post to Flex on Grails, Take 2.
When I first discovered Flex, one of my first obsessions was how to make it work with a Java backend. I’m a java developer at heart and my Java backend stack of choice back then was Spring/Hibernate-based. That’s why I published a series of full-stack articles that became quite popular. But another obsession of mine has always been productivity so when I discovered Grails, it became my new preferred environment and I started looking for ways to plug a Flex frontend into a Grails backend. All of this work culminated in the release of my Grails BlazeDS plugin which worked great but had a few limitations (only Java DTO’s, run-war instead of run-app, etc.). I mean, it worked great… until it didn’t.
For years, I’ve been using a very simple but very effective technique to introduce myself in job interviews, and I’ve always got some excellent feedback about it. I’m not talking about the content here, but the format. It can always be a bit tricky to introduce yourself without diving too much into irrelevant details, or losing yourself along the way, or boring the interviewer to death. To avoid all that, I’ve learnt this technique at Axen, but since Axen doesn’t exist anymore per se, I might as well share it with you guys, because it’s always a shame to miss a good recruitment because he wasn’t clear enough during his interview. So here you go…
Still one session to attend about closures in Objective-C, and I’ll call it a week. A little bit of shopping this afternoon in order to spend my last dollars and I’ll be ready for take-off tomorrow afternoon. So it’s time for a little summary of this week. Overall, it was my first WWDC and I’m
One of the main goals I’ve been pursuing for a few months is the integration of Grails with Flex 4. I need to rework ConferenceGuide‘s administration backend to make it more ergonomic so that we can cover more events, and ever since I discovered Flex 4 niceties, I couldn’t think of doing that with anything
Every year, the main reason why I go to Devoxx is to discover new stuff. For me it’s all about technology watch. The internet and RSS feeds are my main tech watch instrument but there is one thing that is harder to get through RSS: feelings. Conferences like Devoxx are a unique opportunity, not only