Author Archives: Geoff Lane

About Geoff Lane

I’m Geoff Lane and I write Zorched.net as I figure things out about software development in the hopes that it can help other people facing similar situations. Also as a thanks to the larger web community for all of the information and knowledge that they have shared. I’ve been a professional software developer since 1999 working with a variety of different technologies. I’ve worked for startups in the Silicon Valley and Chicago, IL and now work as a consultant building custom applications for clients.

MongoDB Replication is Easy

Posted on August 8, 2010 by Geoff Lane

Database replication with MongoDB is easy to setup. Replication duplicates all of the data from a master to one or more slave instances and allows for safety and quick recovery in case of a problem with your master database. Here … Continue reading →

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MongoDB and Java: Find an item by Id

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Geoff Lane

MongoDB is one of a number of new databases that have cropped up lately eschewing SQL. These NoSQL databases provide non-relational models that are suitable for solving different kinds of problems. This camp includes document oriented, tabular and key/value oriented … Continue reading →

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Random but Evenly Distributed Sets of Numbers

Posted on April 17, 2010 by Geoff Lane

Let’s say one is a computer programmer and let’s say one’s wife (or roommate; or significant other) does social science research (a totally hypothetical scenario of course). When doing social science research one needs to create randomized groups of participants. … Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Python | Leave a comment

Announcing Grails Constraints Custom Domain Constraint Plugin

Posted on October 26, 2009 by Geoff Lane

I’ve released my first public Grails Plugin today. The Grails Constraint plugin gives you the ability to create custom Constraints that you can apply to your Domain classes to validate them. These are applied and act just like the built … Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Groovy | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

DRYing Grails Criteria Queries

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Geoff Lane

When you’re writing code, Don’t Repeat Yourself. Now say that 5 times. *rimshot* One of the things that I find myself repeating a lot of in many business apps is queries. It’s common to have a rule or filter that … Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Groovy, Web | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

Struts2 Map Form to Collection of Objects

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Geoff Lane

The Struts2 documentation contains examples that are often basic at best which can make it challenging to figure out how to do things sometimes. I was working on creating a form that would allow me to select values from a … Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Java | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Password Strength Validation with Regular Expressions

Posted on May 8, 2009 by Geoff Lane

Regular Expressions are both complex and elegant at the same time. They can be made to look like someone was just randomly hammering on their keyboard. They are also an incredibly efficient and elegant solution to describing the structure of … Continue reading →

Posted in Code | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Scala and Adding New Syntax

Posted on April 26, 2009 by Geoff Lane

One interesting thing about some languages is their support for adding new syntax. While all languages have the ability to add new functions or types some have specific properties that make it easy to add what looks like new built-in … Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Scala | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Grails Embedded Classes ClassCastException

Posted on April 21, 2009 by Geoff Lane

Using ORM tools allow you to map the data to a database independently of how your object model looks. Grails supports one-to-many and one-to-one relationships if you want to have the data in different table. But what about when you … Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Groovy | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Update Table Data in Grails using Ajax Calls

Posted on March 27, 2009 by Geoff Lane

Using Ajax for simple forms can offer users a very clean, simple and fast way to input data. I came across a situation recently where I was looking into replacing a document based workflow with an application. The documents themselves … Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Groovy | Tagged , , | 5 Comments