I am big fan of picking up other languages. I think they are important for developers to advance their programming skills. One of my favorite languages around is Groovy. Grails is an open-source web application framework that's all about getting things done. At the very core of Grails is Groovy and some other popular frameworks such as Hibernate and Spring. If you want to learn Grails I have an awesome resource for you that just happens to be free. Head over to InfoQ and download the second edition of Getting started with Grails for free.

This entry was posted on February 7, 2010 at 11:44 PM and has received 2318 views. Comments 0 | Print this entry.

I am off in about an hour until the new year and I am pretty excited to have a nice long break. If you are looking to pick up another language over the Holidays I would suggest looking at 2 languages. Groovy/Grails if you want to stay in a similar environment and python because well it just seems cool and a buddy of mine is a python developer and swears by it. Luck for you Grails 1.2 was just released. I did a quick scan through the new features and found something that I thought was pretty cool. GORM now supports defining named queries in a domain class. For example, given a domain class like this: class Publication { String title Date datePublished static namedQueries = { recentPublications { def now = new Date() gt 'datePublished', now - 365 } publicationsWithBookInTitle { like 'title', '%Book%' } } } This allows you to do: // get all recent publications def recentPubs = Publication.recentPublications.list() // get up to 10 recent publications, skip the first 5... def recentPubs = Publication.recentPublications.list(max: 10, offset: 5) // get the number of recent publications... def numberOfRecentPubs = Publication.recentPublications.count() // get a recent publication with a specific id... def pub = Publication.recentPublications.get(42) // dynamic finders are supported def pubs = Publication.recentPublications.findAllByTitle('Some Title')

I hope all of you have a wonderful holiday and if you have some extra time fill your brain with some knowledge!

This entry was posted on December 23, 2009 at 11:40 AM and has received 2196 views. Comments 6 | Print this entry.

This entry was posted on March 11, 2009 at 9:34 AM and has received 1954 views. Comments 4 | Print this entry.

A goal of mine for the new year was to pick up another language. I am perfectly happy in my daytime life of developing ColdFusion applications but I really feel like your doing yourself a disservice. If you step back and take your programming hat off you will see that the same values apply in real life. There are always more than one way to solve a problem right, well imagine that you always solved a problem with the same solution. First off you would never realize there was an easier solution and second you would never be able to share your trials with others.

It is this kind of mind set and realization that brought me to this point. I want to learn another language and while I am picking up Flex/AS3 its just a different animal. I want to pick up something more from the web world and comparable to CFML. After taking a look around I emailed my new twitter buddy @groovymag and asked him why I should learn Grails & Groovy. He was able to write up a pretty nice article that has some great points in and you can check out the article here. With this and some research on my part I have settled on Grails as a my new language to learn.

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This entry was posted on February 3, 2009 at 2:56 PM and has received 3792 views. Comments 7 | Print this entry.