Posts Tagged ‘Groovy’
Using Groovy to decypher adolescent Internet use
I’ve been meaning to write about my experiences using the Groovy dynamic language in educational research for a while, but haven’t found time to do so due to a grueling work schedule and burnout.
This post talks about how the Groovy dynamic language is used in an educational research setting, helping us better understand the way in which Internet use plays a role in adolescent development.
Read the rest of this entry »
Groovy, XLIFF and a translation generator
We recently had to translate a site to 13 different languages using Actionscript 2 ( arghhh ).The translation provided us was in Excel worksheets, and was just a nightmare to get right. We needed a way to quickly generate the translations as they changed. Read the rest of this entry »
Nine Lessons from building a Grails / Flex / Flash website
I just finished putting the finishing touches on phase one of our video and animation heavy Flash / Grails / Flex site. We spent about 2 months on this site, figuring out how to get Flex, Flash and Grails to work together nicely, and I thought I would share some of the lessons learned in this post.
Editing Resources in Maven with GMaven and Groovy Templates
In this post, I will show how to build a simple yet robust resource modification engine for Maven using GMaven and Groovy Templates.
We sometimes need to generate files in our build cycle that are specific to each server and change per deployment cycle. For some projects, this might be Flash / Flex actionscript files that need to reference the build server. For others, it might be datasource locations that change per build project. While maven provides a built-in resource filtering mechanism, it is tied to parts of the maven lifecycle that might not work well for all projects, and mostly changes resources for War files.
Groovy provides a very robust Templating engine. With the introduction of the GMaven plugin, it becomes possible to filter and re-write resource files using this robust mechanism. Combined with the power of Maven’s built-in profiles mechanism, this solution provides a robust and powerful way to edit Flex / Grails and other resources. Read the rest of this entry »
MacPorts portFile for Groovy 1.5.6
As long as we’re building port files for MacPorts, here is the updated Groovy 1.5.6 portFile ( the one in macport has an old version 1.0 for some reason ).
You can download the file from the ticket. Hopefully it can be approved soon.
This will install the latest release of Groovy ( as of April 2008 ) when you call sudo port install groovy
Read the rest of this entry »
Grails, SEO, SWFObject and Flex : Progressive Enhancement – Layering SWF on top of GSPs
I’ve been busy figuring out how Grails can help search engine rankings of Flex / Flash applications. In this post, I will show how the SWFObject library can be used with Grails layouts to enable a SEO technique called Progressive Enhancement ( thanks Ted! ).
Progressive Enhancement is a technique that allows the same content to be shown to different users, regardless of the ways in which the content is viewed. The idea is that the same content should appear on a Flash player page and one that is plain HTML and indexed by the Google searchbots. Read the rest of this entry »
SEO for Flex RIA with Grails (overview)
The company I used to work for, Elastic Path in Vancouver, invested heavily in making sure that their ecommerce engine was Search Engine Optimized. This was a complicated black art that involved shaping the URL and content of your web page so that Google and Yahoo could pick up the results. There are tons of books out there about this subject, and even people who specialize in this. The company I’m working for now, through it’s iProspect.com branch, also focuses heavily on Search Engine Optimizing websites and pages.
SEO becomes harder with dynamic Rich UI applications that don’t rely on Ajax. While Google is able to pick up Flash SWF files during it’s crawl, this does not guarantee that the content is parsed correctly or given the same weight as any other file formats or a pure HTML/AJAX page. Worse, if the application uses a web service, how can it be guaranteed that all the pages are crawled and returned correctly.
Read the rest of this entry »
Compile and Deploy Flex and Grails with Maven
The project I am working on uses an Adobe Flex front-end and a Grails back-end. We needed a way to inject the flex SWF files into Grails and then deploy into an Apache Tomcat server. After much tampering and banging of head, I came up with a solution that uses GMaven, the Maven Plugin, and Cargo to compile and deploy our modified grails app. Read the rest of this entry »
More image uploading: ImageTools, Transients and Grails
Something that I have come across in my experimentation with Grails is the need to have UI elements in the screen that map to more complex elements in the domain model or things that are not stored in the database. I really like the automagic generation of view elements in Grails GSP files, and have used transient properties to generate views that allow for uploading files. In this post, I will discuss how I used the transient property to enable image uploading in Grails.
REST Service XML Output in Grails via Content Negotiation
The content negotiation feature in Grails is pretty cool. In a nutshell, it allows you to return different formats based on the request of your page.
A recent project I worked on used Grail’s ability to generate CRUD as GSP pages to provide a basic CMS service, and an Adobe Flex front-end that communicated with Grails via REST services. We needed a solution that will preserve the original GSP html output, as well as the ability to return the data as XML for the REST layer.
Read the rest of this entry »
