Getting started with Arduino / Rainbowduino
I recently bought some Arduino microcontroller/prototyping boards and components. The plan is to rediscover my childhood interest in electronics and familiarise myself with these tools so that maybe in future I can help teach some of this at schools. This is because I believe that its the practical stuff that can integrate with other school lessons that can give young people the best start at programming.
The great thing is that actually, with only a little knowledge, doing this stuff is really easy. The Arduino board designs and software are open source, which is a good thing. However as usual this means the docs can be problematic.
Resources 1.1(.1) plugin released
After a frantic 12 hours or so of coding and debugging, I managed to release version 1.1.1 of the Resources plugin for Grails today.
It was meant to be 1.1 but there was a bug that needed fixing immediately after releasing so 1.1.1 is where we’re at. This version is tested with Grails 1.3.7 and Grails 2.0 RC1 which is set to drop this weekend.
What’s new in this release of Resources?
Well aside from some useful bug fixes there’s a few interesting changes:
- If you forget to include r:layoutResources tags, you will get an error in the console. The error may or may not display in the browser currently depending on whether you used site mesh layouts or not. We may be able to improve this in future. This means that people who wondered where their JS code was disappearing to after installing Resources into a 2.0 app will now get an error telling them that they need to add r:layoutResources.
- There is now support for laying out arbitrary dispositions by passing a “disposition” to the r:layoutResources tag. This means you can position sets of resources wherever you like in the output, using multiple dispositions. Currently this is only relevant for JavaScript but in future we should be able to support images so that you can e.g. have a bunch of “preloaded” images that are hidden in the page somewhere.
- The integration with Grails 2.0 has been “finalized” now. The ResourceService has changed to a “grailsResourceProcessor” bean, and all g:javascript invocations result in called to r:require or r:script as necessary. The default layouts in 2.0 now use layoutResources and a default “application” module exists in new projects.
There are still some outstanding important bugs that I will endeavour to fix soon, as well as improving the error reporting on all fronts.
Enjoy!
Optimising your Application with Grails Resources Plugin
It’s been nearly a year since we first announced the Resources framework for Grails. It’s about time we looked at some of the more advanced features that it provides so that you can make the most of this very powerful plugin.
Results of the Grailsrocks Survey
A few weeks back I ran a little survey to get a rough idea of opinion on paid support for Grails plugins, as well as some potentially useful community stats.
Interviewed on DZone
I was interviewed last week by Andres Almiray for DZone.com on matters Grails, Groovy and Weceem.
The interview can be found here.
