Groovy: Dynamic Language for the JVM... Groovy! - I'm continuously encouraged by the influence dynamic languages such as Ruby and Python have had on mainstream runtimes like the CLR and JVM. Direct ports like JRuby, Jython to the JVM and IronRuby and IronPython to the CLR are truly exciting. More exciting still are languages like Boo that are built from the ground up for mainstream runtimes. I've finally had the chance to fool around with a language I've been dying to dig in to that was built specifically for the JVM: Groovy. Groovy is an agile, dynamically-typed, well supported language that is perhaps most famous as the basis for Groovy on Grails, a rails-like web development framework. Example As I typically do I'll show you a quick twitter status example to get your feet wet. Consider the following class...
My Tool List - One of the more popular thing's Scott Hanselman has done is maintain a tool List, essentially a list of applications and utilities that he's found useful. There are plenty of absolute gems in his list and rather than present my own I'd be very comfortable just pointing you to his... But what fun would that be? None! I also think there are a few more that I can add that are relevant to my personal experience. The list is rather short and there's a bit of overlap with Scott's but if all goes as planned I'll expand it over time as old useful tools come to mind or I discover new ones. Cloud iAWSManager - This is an iPhone app that lets you manage many of the functions of Amazon Web...
Employing Solr/Lucene with SQL Server for Full-Text Searching - I've been fiddling with Lucene a good bit of late and have been quite impressed. It's more than just a "blazing fast" full-text indexing system, especially when implemented via Solr. With Solr it becomes an incredibly scalable, full-featured and extensible search engine platform. I had always assumed that the Lucene stack wasn't for me. For the most part I store my data either in SQL Server or MySQL, both of which have perfectly adequate full-text search capability. It turns out that I could have saved myself a few headaches and saved my employer some money by adopting Solr and not writing my own faceting, caching, etc. Naturally, Lucene/Solr isn't for everyone. If you just have a few hundred-thousand rows of text that you want to perform some basic searches on under...
Google Wave Robots in Java - When Google Wave was first announced I was pretty excited. The concept seemed perfect. Broad like twitter but rich like email. Brief like instant messenger but collaborative like a message board. Things have been somewhat slow going in beta thus far. But hey, it's still beta. If Google refines it a bit and wave catches on (what actual does catch on these days seems to be a crap-shoot) it has the potential to provide tons of value. One of the possibilities I find particularly interesting is the use of robots. No, there's nothing underhanded about it, a robust robot API is provided for that very purpose. Automated programs that are participants in the conversation. Shortly after getting development sandbox access I had to get to work on one. While I'm going...
Clojure, A Lisp for the JVM and CLR - I've been becoming increasingly interested in functional languages in the last few years and I'm apparently not the only one. It's pretty hard to listen to any general purpose software development podcast without hearing about Erlang, Haskell or F#. Another one came up recently that I just had to play with. It's a Lisp variant named Clojure. The reason I find Clojure particularly interesting is that it's designed to be hosted in the Java Virtual Machine and the .Net Common Language Runtime (via the DLR). From a practical perspective that's wonderful considering integration with other commonly used libraries in the business world is a snap. I'm sure it annoys Lisp purists, but it makes Clojure much more adoptable between 9 and 5. As is frequently the case this is not something...
Notes on Cloure XML Parsing - I figured I'd share some quick notes I had on a simple task that's not exactly strait forward in Clojure to the Lisp neophyte, like myself: XML Parsing. Clojure goes a long way to making it easy with clojure.xml.parse/xml-seq but complete/concise examples can be difficult to come by. XML All of the examples I'll outline below will depend on the following xml living in a file named "settings.xml" in the current working directory. <settings> <timeout>5000</timeout> <email>example@mail.com</email> <hosts> <host url="http://computer1.domain.com">COMPUTER1</host> <host url="http://computer2.domain.com">COMPUTER2</host> <host url="http://computer3.domain.com">COMPUTER3</host> </hosts> </settings> Basic Requirements In order to prepare clojure for the task at hand we'll need to make use of java.io.File and clojure.xml. (import '(java.io File)) (use 'clojure.xml) Examples Just to get warmed up, consider the following. All this does is load the contents of "settings.xml" into a...
Rich-Style Formatting of an Android TextView - Even a developer-friendly mobile platform like Android can have a developer feeling a little lost when trying to perform simple tasks when you're unfamiliar with the platform. One of these simple, however poorly documented, tasks is rich-style text formatting within a TextView. SpannableString While it's possible to set a TextView's text property to a simple String and configure the TextView to have the formatting you desire you're then limited in how granular you can control the formatting within the TextView itself. The SpannableString class allows you to easily format certain pieces (spans) of a string one way and other pieces another by applying extensions of CharacterStyle (i.e. ForegroundColorSpan) via the setSpan method. In the end this isn't limited to formatting. It also allows the developer to add behaviors to spans such...
