7 Cool Things Learned in the London Cloud Foundry Open Tour.

I was able to attend the Cloud Foundry Open Tour in London on May 1st. While there was a lot of marketing hype and excuses ( ‘Cloud Foundry is the Linux of the Cloud!’, ’80% of our exciting new work is under the water line, we’re an iceberg of innovation!’ ), there were a few very interesting technical features that were shown during the presentations.

In this post, I will outline 7 interesting things about the Cloud Foundry platform that I learned during the Cloud Foundry Open Tour London. 

Is your User Interface culturally insensitive?

I recently tried to book a flight on Netflights.com. When I tried to check out, it warned me that I had to leave out any spaces in my first name.

This immediately raised a red flag in my head. What if the tickets I book end up without a space and I’m prevented from boarding? If they can’t handle spaces or hyphens, how else would they mess up our booking?

Running Vert.x Applications on Heroku

tl;dr:  heroku create –stack cedar –buildpack https://github.com/tomaslin/heroku-buildpack-vertx-jdk7.git

Vert.x is an event driven framework on the JVM combined with a distributed event bus. It’s basically positioning itself as a polyglot version of Node.js on steroids. It supports Groovy, Ruby, JavaScript and Java.

To learn more, visit the Vert.x website or watch this presentation during last year’s grails exchange by Peter Ledbrook.

Heroku is the best cloud platform for deploying developer projects.

In this post, I will show you how to use a custom buildpack to deploy and run Vert.x applications on Heroku.

Adding Mobile Views to your Grails Applications with JQuery Mobile: A Real Life Example

Last month, we launched mobile views for Secret Escapes, our little application written in Grails.

For this project, we chose to implement a set of mobile views on top of our existing Grails application using jQuery Mobile. In less than a month, we were able to implement and put live a set of views that simplified the user experience for our mobile users.

In this post, I will discuss some of the tools, challenges and design decisions that arose from making our existing Grails application more iPhone friendly.

Deploying Grails applications on AppFog. First impressions.

I had a chance to play a little bit with AppFog today. Appfog is a version of VMware’s Cloud Foundry hosted by the makers of PHPFog that aims to overcome some of the limitations of the VMware product. It’s very nice.

In their announcement blog post, AppFog stated: “Cloud Foundry alone has no web interface, no pricing, no plans, no IaaS integration (no AWS, no S3), no support. That is where AppFog shines.”

True to their word, AppFog provides deployment to 4 different providers and offers 64 gigs of memory for a monthly rate of $29.99 (Gringo Dollars).

In this post, I’ll walk briefly over my first impressions deploying a Grails application on AppFog. Overall, it is a much richer and pleasant experience than Cloud Foundry and looks like we finally have a competitor to Heroku or Cloudbees.

Running Geb specs using a separate driver profile to test mobile views in Grails

We’re currently building mobile views for our grails application using jQuery mobile and the Spring mobile plugin. As such, we wanted to add a set of mobile tests in Geb to run in parallel with our application’s functional tests.

In this post, I show how you can set up a separate webdriver profile for a subset of your spock/geb functional tests. 

Slides from ‘A year in the life of a Grails startup’

Here is a copy of our slides from the Grails Exchange. You can watch our talk here.

You can view the entire talk here.

Suggestions to keeping Grails one step ahead – a wishlist

At the Grails Exchange, Marc Palmer gave an excellent talk about keeping Grails one step ahead. This talk resonated a bit with the work we been doing in Secret Escapes for the last few months.

After having a little think about it, I feel like there are a few other things that would be nice to have to make Grails a easier choice for developers:

A Script to run Grails Functional Tests in Parallel

The following post is about our effort to set up a way to run functional tests in Parallel for our grails application. It contains a script that will run functional tests based on X-number of instances of the application server, creating the right databases and the proper environment.

Replacing the Groovy execute() method with one that prints output while the process is running

We are writing a small script to help us run our grails functional tests in parallel.

One of the issues we are running into with Groovy’s execute() method and its online examples is that the output from the process is not available until the process is finished.

When running Grails functional tests, we want to see the results right away in the console to debug things that are going wrong.

The solution we found was to use the Java ProcessBuilder task instead.

So instead of

myCommand.execute()

in Groovy, use the following wall of code:

ProcessBuilder builder = new ProcessBuilder( myCommand.split(' ') )

builder.redirectErrorStream(true)

Process process = builder.start()

InputStream stdout = process.getInputStream ()
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader (new InputStreamReader(stdout))

while ((line = reader.readLine ()) != null) {
   System.out.println ("Stdout: " + line)
}

You could probably change this so that it replaces the groovy metaclass methods, but it’s a start.