One of the more difficult things to manage in software projects is often changing a database schema over time. On the projects that I work on, we don’t usually have DBAs who manage the schema so it is left up to the developers to figure out. The other thing you have to manage is applying [...]

Git is a distributed version control system so it allows you to create branches locally and commit against them. It also supports a more centralized repository model. When using a centralized repository you can push changes to it so that others can pull them more easily. I have a tendency to work on multiple computers. [...]

Continuous Integration is a good practice in software development. It helps catch problems early to prevent them from becoming bigger problems later. It helps to reinforce other practices like frequent checkins and unit testing as well. I’m using CruiseControl (CC) for Continuous Integration at the moment.
One of the things about Grails is that it is [...]

Certain data stored as plain text in a database is just asking for trouble these days. We hear too often about misplaced and stolen computers that contain databases full of Social Security numbers and other information that can lead to identity theft. We can help avoid these situations by encrypting those fields in a database [...]

I am a generalist. I like Ruby and Groovy, Rails and Grails, Objective C and Python sometimes. I use bash scripts and I use Java and .NET too. I work on a MacBook Pro running OS X and a Thinkpad running Windows XP. I run my server on Ubuntu Linux. I use to run Linux [...]

In my previous post I wrote about Building a Custom Validator in Grails using a Plugin. That’s a great way to build a reusable Constraint that will allow you to share your code among multiple projects. But often you only have one application that you are building, or a validator is a very domain specific [...]

Grails is a really nice MVC framework inspired by Ruby on Rails. The difference is that Grails is built using Groovy and Java and leverages existing, well known frameworks as it’s foundation. It is essentially a fairly thin convention-over-configuration and integration layer on top of Spring and Hibernate. The documentation for common scenarios is pretty [...]

In a previous post I wrote about DSLs as Jargon. I implemented a simple Coffee DSL that would allow code to parse an order written by a human and turn it into a domain model. I used a fairly basic method_missing structure to capture the values.
There’s a much better way to do it in Ruby [...]

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are discussed all the time. There is a lot of writing about implementing DSLs and many dynamic languages like Ruby and Groovy make it really fairly easy to do it. But rarely do I see it discussed how you figure out when it makes sense to implement a DSL.
Some people would [...]

Wikipedia defines a mixin as “a class that provides a certain functionality to be inherited by a subclass, but is not meant to stand alone. Inheriting from a mixin is not a form of specialization but is rather a means to collect functionality. A subclass may even choose to inherit most or all of its [...]