I will be speaking at the Groovy / Grails Exchange in London

It’s a little overdue, but I am excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at the Groovy / Grails Exchange in London on Dec 9 and 10.

The topic of my talk will be ‘Building Killer RIAs with Flex and Grails’, and you can read all about it on the Conference website. Building Killer RIAs with Flex and Grails.

It’s my first conference presentation, so please be gentle…

See you all there!

Lessons Learned: Building a simple Ad Host with Grails on the Google App Engine

In this post, I share my experiences building a simple Content Host with Grails and the Google App Engine.

Google App Engine as a Super Aggressive Cache Service for Grails Apps.

I’ve been thinking a bit about how to use the Google App Engine in a Grails deployment infrastructure. In the following post, I want to sketch out how to use the Google App Engine as an aggressive cache mechanism for Grails applications to reduce the cost of Grails experiments.

9 Tips to Planning and Building Maintainable Grails UIs

How can we build user interfaces using GSP that are manageable and easy to update? Many of the books on Grails focus on the technology available in Grails, but very few give rules and techniques to make GSPs manageable.

Grails templates and the out-of-the-box functionality is great. But once you start trying to integrate layouts and designs for real world websites, you’ll find that bad coding practices can quickly lead to a chaotic and unmaintainable mess of spaghetti code.

In this post, I want to share some tips, lessons and ideas I have learned from projects worked in the last year and a half of Grails UI development.

Grails Hosting Solutions? Here’s a list…

Inspired by a recent post in the mailing list, I’ve decided to gather a list of web hosts that are Grails friendly or recommended by Developers…

• Google App Engine
• Amazon EC2
• eApps
• Morph
• A2
• Hetzner.de

Know any more? What do you use for your Grails hosting? ( List from Grails.org )

Discussions about this on the Grails Mailing List:http://www.nabble.com/Grails-Hosting%3A-Which-Company%2C-Which-Application-Server-td24860653.html

Flex on Grails Book Update: Making it Free!

I’ve decided to share what I’ve written about Flex on Grails as a book online under the Creative Commons License.

http://sites.google.com/site/flexongrails/

Right now, only the preface and the hello world chapters are online. In the coming weeks, I’ll update the content on my hard drive, write new content and post them online. Feedback is highly appreciated.

This book will target Flex 4 and either Grails 1.2. or Grails 2.0, depending on it’s release schedule.

A Cooliris CMS for the Google App Engine: Manage and Host XML-based Flash and Flex Components with Grails

There is an incredible wealth of amazing looking Flash components in the market today. Tools like Cooliris and the 3D Wall provide visually stunning components that can quickly make any website come alive. With Grails and the Google App Engine, we can build simple, secure and powerful content management engines for these components with very little effort.

In this post, I walk you through all the steps you need in hosting, deploying and securing a Cooliris CMS for the Google App Engine using Grails.

Tip: Flex is also XML friendly, so you can use this technique to add CMS-ed apps on Flex.

Book Review: Grails 1.1 Web Application Development

I received a free review copy of Grails 1.1 Web Application Development from Packt Press. They asked me to provide a review for it. Unfortunately, this review will be less than glowing ( sorry Packt ).

Pixel Bender and Alchemy Links from London Platform Flash User Group

Just came back from the LPFUG talk on Pixel Bender by Michael Chase and the Alchemy talk by Thomas Vian. Lots of good links shared – thought I would compile them so I don’t forget:

Pixel Bender

Pixel Bender lets you build Photoshop-like filters and apply them to Flex/Flash movies on runtime without affecting the image.

[Adobe Labs sayz] The Adobe® Pixel Bender™ technology delivers a common image and video processing infrastructure which provides automatic runtime optimization on heterogeneous hardware. You can use the Pixel Bender kernel language to implement image processing algorithms (filters or effects) in a hardware-independent manner. The Pixel Bender graph language is an XML-based language for combining individual pixel-processing operations (kernels) into more complex Pixel Bender filters.

Grails on The Google App Engine: Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask

I’ve been playing with Grails and the Google App Engine for about a month. Overall, I’ve been very happy about the experience. There seem to be a few questions and misconceptions about the app engine and Grails, both on forums, blogs and the Grails mailing list. I thought I would put together a quick summary for those looking for more information about deploying on this platform.