Marc Palmer

I’ll add this to Atlassian’s Jira when I have a moment… I think some are on there already,  but some things have been praying on my mind:

1. You need to be able to “Send this portlet” to another user, and have it send them the required filter also if it is not a global shared filter.
2. They really need email announcements when versions are released, and allow users to “watch” projects to receive these emails.
3. Users should be able to choose only the projects they are concerned with. For example on jira.codehaus.org there are loads of projects and as a “privileged” user there I can see all of them, but that sucks. True this could be done with permissions but that means 1 permission scheme per project, and even then I might work on only 5 projects today, but a couple more next week. The project pop ups are therefore extremely overloaded for me.

There’s a nicely executed Greenpeace campaign to try to force Apple’s hand to improve their green credentials.

I thought Steve Jobs was vegan… unless this is just because he thinks the diet will help him liver forever, it should mean caring a lot about the environment. I am very surprised Apple don’t have free takeback and recycle of their products.

What an infuriating process it is trying to get the correct car seat for your child. Finding one that actually fits your car well and is safety tested is almost impossible, at least for us it seems to be.

Why are all these car seat websites so stupid that they offer you every single seat they sell? You have a specific car. Many of their seats will not work correctly in it or need to be in specific positions … all these sites should let people choose their car first and then only show the seats that fit. It’s not rocket science, it’s called understanding your customers’ needs!

History in the making. Sven Haiges has kindly made the first Grails screencast. It walks you through the process of creating a new Grails project, defining a domain class, and running the application and creating data records using the “scaffolding” feature of Grails that lets you get a CRUD web user interface with zero coding.

Check it out here

Of course scaffolding doesn’t really cut it in the big wide world, but its a great way to get started, and is also useful for trivial domain model prototyping.

I’m rather pleased to have been able to contribute a new feature to Grails. It’s my first significant contribution to the Grails codebase. Grails, for those who don’t know, is a Groovy application framework using coding by convention in a similar vein to Rails. You write minimal code and almost no configuration, and get solid webapps out the other end. The ORM/Hibernate integration is just amazing.

The new feature adds custom validation support to domain class constraints. You can supply a closure to do any validation you like, with full control of the message code used when failures occur. What’s more this works in tandem with other constraints such as nullable, blank, minLength etc.

This is but part of the journey for validation. We plan some nice convention based validator lookup so you can easily extend the base set of named validators in you application, and providing constraint validation on non-domain classes.

The interesting part for me is coding Java to talk to Groovy closures and the issues that raises. It makes me appreciate the hoops the Java end has to jump through to make the convention thing work by providing flexibility in usage, and also the nuances of type compatibility differences between Groovy and Java.

It just makes me wish more of Grails was actually written in Groovy… if it weren’t for the performance impact of that. Writing Java these days is getting to be a bit of a bore compared to writing Groovy.