One of the more exciting things I've learned about recently is doing behavior driven development (BDD) with a framework called easyb. Easyb allows you to test your system by defining behavior in stories and specifications in a way that allows your "non-developer" stakeholders to understand them relatively easily. [...] Since I've been doing a ton of Grails work lately, naturally I wanted to try to incorporate it into my Grails workflow. Fortunately, there's a plugin for that, the Grails easyb plugin.

Typography is perhaps the most important part of design. It makes text into art and changes the way we look at design. I have compiled a list of the free fonts which I believe to be the sexiest!

The first thing one should undestand before he tries to integrate scripting support into his application / framework are class loading issues. One of the main reasons (next to the ability to easily switch from Java) why we have chosen Groovy as our primary scripting language is very good support for live refresh of Groovy classes when source file has changed. But what does Groovy exactly do when it “refreshes” its loaded classes to conform to a newly modified source file? What about existing instances referencing to this class? Is it even possible in JVM to change class structure in runtime? Yes JavaRebel can do this, but it needs special setup and debug mode for hotswap. And how does all this fit into the existing Spring support? From the documentation it seems, that it all just magically works! Dozens of questions ran in my mind when I started to strive for Groovy integration in our product. Those questions gets answered in this article.

Can dynamic language be staticly compiled

Normally when we are working with readers and writers in Java we must make sure we close the appropriate reader and writer. Groovy has several with...() methods for File, URL or streams and writers, where ... is the name of the reader or writer. We pass a closure to these methods and Groovy makes sure all readers and writers are closed correctly, even if exceptions are thrown in the closure.

Last week I attended a groovy & grails training by SpringSource. My first introduction into grails is about 2 years a go. I attended a talk at the spring experience. Back than I liked it, tried it, but did not really use it. By now a lot has changed, most of all very good tool integration by intellij. Last week I had the change to go to a training, now I am motivated to start using grails more often. This post I will talk you through a grails application I have created for a project of mine. I also take you through some of the things I learned last week. Finally I’ll show you that you can create a google app engine application using grails. There are ways to create grails applications, I’ll show you how to do it using the latest intellij 9 beta release.

I downloaded and unzipped Griffon 0.2 today. Because I set GRIFFON_HOME and added its bin to PATH, I could immediately begin using it in NetBeans IDE (to which end I recompiled the NetBeans Griffon plugin so that it now works in 6.8 Beta).

Gradle is a build system to build software projects. Gradle supports convention over configuration, build-in takss and dependency support. We write a build script in Groovy (!) to define our Gradle build. This means we can use all available Groovy (and Java) stuff we want, like control structures, classes and methods. In this post we see how we can use Gradle to build a very simple mixed Java and Groovy projec