When easy became easier ...

In the last couple of weeks i have been analyzing, modelling and choosing some tools to build a small app. When i started this project i was perhaps a bit naive in thinking that i would be coding in no time ! Yes it's true, the model seems to be quite consistent, scalable (and i'm quite happy with it). Now cold and true reality ... if anyone has already tried to configure Hibernate (trough annotations or XML) in a way he could easily map 3 levels of inheritance with the 2 top classes being abstract knows what's the cold and true reality i'm talking about ! It was easier than JDBC (or at least more comfortable to me) but any change i would have to do in any of the classes implied fiddling with a huge amount of code.
Then it came to me: What if i can find some tool(s) that allow me to kind of build a skeleton of my app and then start polishing it ? The good news (at least for me) is that i , not only have found Grails but also Roo (SpringRoo). Believe me that's when easy became easier !

SpringRoo: http://www.springsource.org/roo

Grails:        http://www.grails.org/

Check those 2 pages ... perhaps those tools will come on handy for your project, but one thing is for sure: you will have lot's of fun !

Erlang in Action MEAP

Ok i'm warming up... by this time i already have my virtual machine ready with Ubuntu. I'll be starting real soon to post my experience in following the book. It will be a review as you follow thing !

an interesting article : 10-reasons-why-people-initially-suck-at-programming

Here is the link: http://talkbinary.com/articles/10-reasons-why-people-initially-suck-at-programming/

I saw people using reason #3 so many times during the last three years ... guys listen up : the resources are there for the taking. We never had so many information available like today ...

a book review is always a good excuse to learn...

A couple of days ago while i was browsing trough some tweets i found one that caught my attention. Manning, the book publisher was looking for reviewers for this book http://www.manning.com/logan/
I sent an email saying that i'm a complete noob (though i can tell Erlang from an apple) but that i wished to learn Erlang for a long time and this would be the perfect oportunity. Guess what ? They've sent me a copy !
I will be posting my progress trough the book and hopefully i'll actually learn some Erlang.

some Groovy stuff ...

I'm currently working on a project that has started, at least conceptually, in Java. It's an app for managing some patient records and to give some kind of statistical information to healthcare professionals. Entity classes, persistence layers, DAO pattern, mobile interface, native interface ... and so on ...
I thought Spring might be the way. Ok next step "Springify" my app.
But wait... i don't know how to do it !
No problem grabbed some books watched some lectures browsed some tutorials and off we go !

At some point i started wondering ... what if there is a way to prototype this app in an elegant and less verbose way ? That would be great, i could take a more try-and-buy approach. If something doesn't make sense go back and follow another path.

Then i met Grails, it's Groovy, it's Java(ish), i can use Spring stuff, there is also Hibernate. Oh well it was love at first sight (i can assure you that we kept on dating and i'm still quite happy) !

Finally !

Procrastination is over !
Time to blog about things that don't ring a bell to many people. For the others, the ones who have some interest in programming languages, software architecture and are slightly interested in my life i can only say: Welcome a board ! (or perhaps Welcome onboard !)