I aim to kill you Keith, or see you hang.
After finally cracking during high school musical and bursting into tears at the god awfulness of it all I decided it was high time the family watched films I like. I suddenly had the urge to have at my finger tips those films that are on all the time but you never watch. Stiff upper lip British war films and a jolly good western.
Here is my selection:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid
True Grit
Battle of the River Plate
The Cruel Sea
In which we serve
They dive at dawn.
Cheap as chips of course. They arrive on the weekend, and in anticipation I have been shouting “Rooster Cogburn” quotes at people. My favorite is:
“I mean to kill you in one minute, [insert name]. Or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker’s convenience. Which’ll it be?”
Its then probably a good idea to put your mouse cable between your teeth and let off imaginary shots. Try it yourself at the water cooler at work, if nothing else it’ll kill time.
Rails or Grails
I have just emerged - blinking - from a long splurge of Java server side development. Bluetrail’s products are based on the Spring/Hibernate stack and while I can appreciate the power of these technologies they certainly aren’t the most fleet of foot. Productivity is not as high as I would like and to be honest web programming with Java can be pretty turgid, what with all the build scripts, XML, compilations and Tomcat context reloads.
As ever, I am always casting my eye over the fence and very attracted to the emerging “code by convention” frameworks. The two contender of course are “Ruby on Rails” and the more Java (or should I say Groovy) based “Groovy on Grails“.
The web is full of talk about these two technologies but I was trying to distill in my mind what the key strengths and weaknesses are:
Ruby on Rails:
Ruby looks brilliant, it is all in one box as opposed to lots of different libraries and the community is strong. The language is significantly different to Java but should be easy enough to pick up. Development productivity is pushed even further by the hot fix nature of the tools - more quick changes as opposed to context restarts and re-compilations.
On the downside, the deployment looks a bit messy - my hoster is already releasing a new environment based on Mongrel having only just started doing Ruby hosting last year. As I have said most of our stuff is written in Java so moving to Ruby would mean total re-writes - sigh. For this reason I am also no not convinced that Ruby will be taken up in the corporate environment in any big way. This is important as it is nice to have skills you can sell in to the blokes with cash now and again.
Finally I don’t buy all the scalability bollocks people keep on about. Twitter may have had problems but then it is a mentally busy site. For 96% of us (statistics provided my dog Betty) this doesn’t matter a jot - productivity is the big payback.
Grails
What makes Grails really attractive is that is promises all the productivity benefits of ROR but is built on the Java/Hibernate stack so you can still use some of you existing Java skills and potentially integrate into you existing Java code and libraries. You will have to learn Groovy but then you’ll have to learn Ruby too so that is canceled out.
The product of a Grails app is of course a WAR file so this should deploy to your existing Java server environment in the same way - no farting about with new hosting environments.
The downsides appear to be that Grails is not as mature as ROR. I think it only got it’s 1.0 release last year and I am never an early adopter of anything if I can help it. That said, it certainly appears to have got some traction out there so it will have a future. Another thing that turns me off is that it is not as quick as rails in making little changes. This is one of the big things that breaks my heart about Java server side development …. sigh.
Next Steps
My head tells me to invest a bit of time in Grails. I love the look of ROR but I can’t be arsed to bin all of my existing code. The next step then is to buy a Groovy on Grails book and leave it in the upstairs toilet.
;-)
links for 2008-03-06
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Get those cables under control girls
links for 2008-02-28
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Groovy java chart things, used em for years.
What did you do in the computer wars dad?
Do I just sit here talking bollocks and playing the ukulele, I hear you ask. Well that does take up quite a bit of time but my day job involves creating applications for mobile phones. This is done mainly in Java ME but increasingly we are involved in mobile web applications. Our main focus for the past year has been our Mobriz product, which enables people to dynamically capture information via user editable surveys downloaded to their mobile phone.
Over the last few months we have added the capability to capture images from the phone too. These are stored in the phones RMS storage and uploaded to to the server via the phone’s network connection. Mucho thanks to Steve & Jason at Paxmodept for their help getting this rolling.
Here are a few screen shots of the phone and finally a picture of real uploaded picture.
links for 2008-02-27
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Digging the jasper reports designer thing
Fishy Bands
My mate Gravy came up with these, any other ideas?
Stevie Ray Prawn
Marlin Manson
Pike & Tuna Turner
Cliff Pilchard & The Shallows
Clammad
Jerry & The Plaicemakers
Bob Marlin & The Whalers
Cypress Krill
Eel.L.O.
Dianna Rock & The Sardines
The Krillers
Wu-Tang Clam
Emerson Hake & Palmer
Codplay
Tangerine Bream
Lloyd Coley and the Calm Oceans
Prefab Trout
Jefferson Starfish
Kippers With Attitude
Public Anemone
Dourade Dourade
Skate Bush
Limpit Bizkit
The Small Plaices
Joe Cockle
Frank Snapper & The Mullets of Invention
Fleetwood Mackerel
Squiddy Pop and the Sturgeons
Sharka Khan
The Arctic Minkes
Hake That
Gerry Halibut
Porpoisehead
Catfish Stevens
Stickleback
Paul Salmon & Dart Garfunkle
Soft Shell
Spratti Smith
De La Sole
Salmon Dave
links for 2008-02-16
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Wooooo dig the crazy open source java thing.
Talkin’ ’bout no good low battery, on the train, iChat Blues.
links for 2008-02-14
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Super GTD system and it’s free
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Kind of a hack of GTD with some extra good bits.