IDEA X for the Grails Developer

The new version of IntelliJ IDEA was released last week. I already blogged what IDEA X means for Groovy developers, and all of those features are obviously available to any Community Edition user (that’s the free one). This post looks at all the new Grails features available in the Ultimate Edition (the one you pay for). These features are a little harder for me to try out personally as my current project is EJB3 and not Grails (someone save me please!). I’ve tried quite a few of them personally, but feedback is always welcome in case I miss or exaggerate something.

As usual, you can read the full article over on the Canoo blog. Feeling magnanimous? Upvote at DZone.

Happy holidays everyone. Six years ago this week I decided to take a few vacation days at my in-law's house and finally get serious about learning Java. I wrote a little Swing app called "TimeTool" whose source code I would be thoroughly embarrassed by today. What a long, strange trip it's been.

Beginner Bash: Must-Know Bash Commands

I switched full time to Ubuntu Linux last year and haven’t looked back. In this year I’ve learned to love the Bash shell (which includes the Terminal in Mac and Cygwin on Windows). At this point, I can finally say I’m faster in Bash then I was in Windows Explorer, Commander, Nautilus, or the Windows command prompt; and I prided myself on being a guy with a lot of .bat files. My goal now is to write some tips I learned in the last year. Before explaining the more advanced stuff I want to introduce some of the most basic basics.

So here it is: "Stuff I wish someone had explained clearly to me a year ago". Almost all these apply to Cygwin in Windows as well as Mac/Ubuntu Terminal.

As is usual these days, the full article is available on the Canoo blog. And if you want to upvote then head on over to DZone or clicky clicky on up arrow at the bottom of the post.

IntelliJ IDEA X for Groovy Developers

The new version of IntelliJ IDEA was released last week. Here’s what it means for Groovy developers. I’ve tried out most of these new features, but there are one or two that I haven’t yet seen in action. Also, there’s a whole slew of Grails features that I’ll cover in a later blog post.

Without further ado, read about the features over on the Canoo Blog. As always, if you want to contribute to the hype cycle then vote this up at DZone.

Mockito – Screencasts for Stubbing, Verifying, and Argument Matching

We're rolling out Mockito and trying to raise our testability at work and I'm set to give a presentation/training session tomorrow to a few new teams. In case you don't know, Mockito is a mock object framework for Java. It's competitors are EasyMock, JMock, and others if you're more familiar with those. If you haven't seen it then you may want to check out my old post "Mockito - Pros, Cons, and Best Practices". To prepare for my presentation I decided to record myself practicing my material and post it on youtube. Enjoy!

The first screencast is about creating mock objects and stubbing behavior. These are the absolute basics of mocking.


The second screencast is about verifying behavior, or verifying side effects, using Mockito. This is a little more advanced but still an essential API in working with Mockito. YouTube reports this video as 13 minutes long, but don't worry it is only 4:45. Some quirk of YouTube.


The final screencast is about argument matchers, which add flexibility to your stub and verify phases.


I hope you enjoyed these. They could be a little more practiced, but I'm happy enough with the quality. I recorded these on Ubuntu 10.4 using recordMyDesktop and mencode to convert from .ogv to .avi.

Slimmed Down Software – A Lean, Groovy Approach Part 6 – Respect People

Respecting people means creating an environment where the human element drives innovation and value. Creative problem solving and spontaneity are our most valuable assets, and great companies arrange their development process to let every single employee be able to exercise these traits...

The entire article, as usual, is available over to the Canoo Blog. And you can of course vote on DZone.

This article originally appeared in the September 2010 edition of GroovyMag, the Groovy and Grails magazine. Part 7 is currently available for download from the magazine’s site, and more will come each month. Previous articles in this series are on the Canoo website: Part 1: Eliminate Waste, Part 2: Build Quality In, Part 3: Create Knowledge, Part 4: Defer Commitment, and Part 5: Deliver Fast. Lastly, if you like this, you may want to check out some of my older blog posts from my personal site under the ‘craft’ category. Enjoy!

Remote Script Execution with GroovySocketServer

File under: extremely dangerous but definitely fun. Here's some directions on how to execute any arbitrary Groovy script on a remote server. We're going to write a one line Groovy script that, when run, will listen to a socket and execute any incoming text as if it were Groovy script and return the result to the client. We'll do it from the command line and programatically. The client is actually more difficult to write and weighs in at a whooping 5 lines. Let's get started.

The whole article is available on the Canoo Blog. For those inclined there is certainly a Dzone Link to upvote. And none of the URLs have dirty words in them this time!