Tomás Lin’s Programming Brain Dump

In this post, I want to share my experience building a content management solution for a Grails application using Adobe AIR and XML bundles. This solution allows semi-static content to be kept externally. Main benefits are ease of deployment and desktop integration. Read the rest of this entry »

How do you get rid of the product backgrounds?

This was a problem that has plagued me and the other user interface developers at Pixsta ever since I started working here. Our efforts to build nice homepages and cool Facebook / Twitter apps seems almost hampered every try by the limitation that our product images always had a white background.

I decided to spend a little time investigating how we could remove backgrounds on the client-side, and immediately thought of Pixel Bender. In this post, I share the results of my experimentation and show that Pixel Bender is a viable alternative to server-side image manipulation and calculation. It really highlights the power of Flash and Flex over other client technologies like JavaScript. Read the rest of this entry »

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!

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

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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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

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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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 ).
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