Creating a Rails app with all the dependencies has never been so easy - rg, a template-based rails app generator has been just added to the core.

Grails 1.1 beta 1 is out, and the release notes give a nice snapshot of some of the sweet new features coming.

I have been working on a fun project recently which is built on Zend Framework. While looking at options for paginating a large result set, I came across a Zend Framework module called Zend_Paginator ... and it does just what it says on the tin!

Codeigniter have Helpers, Plugins and Libraries. All three 'hooks' can be used to achieve the same results. The question then is, when do you use what? Why is it important to organize your PHP codes? Find out here.

A few years ago Digg released a very cool little visualisation tool they dubbed the Digg Spy (it's since been upgraded to the Big Spy). Recently Realmac Software released the site QuickSnapper to accompany LittleSnapper. It's the QuickSnapper site (the left hand side) that makes use of the similar spy technique that I'll explain how to produce.

Statistics about Wicket.

For the past several months I've been toying around with a project called JavaBuilders. It is a library that allows you to define layout, binding, and validation in a YAML file to produce Swing (and as of today SWT) frames, panels, etc. It uses MigLayout, which I love. The binding has to date been ok, but not great. The reason is because for binding to work in Swing your JavaBeans need to be real JavaBeans. That means property support. Adding property support isn't a painful process but it is tedious. The bigger problem is if you are using a library or a system where the domain objects already exist and you can't modify them then you can't get true Swing binding.

REST is an architectural style, or set of conventions, for web applications and services that centers itself around resource manipulation and the HTTP spec. REST is an architectural style, or set of conventions, for web applications and services that centers itself around resource manipulation and the HTTP spec.

Today is the day a great portion of the community has been waiting for, even without knowing that it will be today. As our early Christmas present, we finalized the 1.2 release of symfony after some weeks of hard work. We will be revealing more presents soon, stay tuned :-)

Maybe you have been wondering why I’ve been so quiet on the blog. Maybe you’re on the Grails-User or Grails-Dev mailing list and have been wondering where all my questions about the corner cases of GORM have originated. Maybe you’ve been watching my GitHub work and noticing it’s trailed off recently. Or maybe this will come as a complete surprise to you.

I implemented my pet project in both GWT-Ext (GWT 1.4.6 and GWT-Ext 0.9.3 in December 2007) and ZK (ZK 3.5.1 with ZK Studio 0.9.0 in November 2008) and compared the Source Line of Code (SLOC) counts using Code Count tool.

It is a fact that we need a persistence solution. Most of applications are database-driven and need to access tables, modify data. Although there are many questions about persistence frameworks, we need them a lot when developing applications. Otherwise SQL codes scatters across applications causing an ugly and unmanageable application. Persistence frameworks build a database layer and separates concerns. Java Persistence solutions are divided into two branches. One is Java standard solutions; JDBC, EJB, JDO. The other is ORM (Object-relational Mapping) frameworks; Hibernate, Toplink, Enterprise Object Framework, iBatis etc. Let me ask the basic question that everybody somehow asks himself “Isn’t there any other solution to persistence problem simpler and more powerful?” I have been reading many problems about this issue. Last one was Sun’s attempt to simplify EJB. In fact, this is why new frameworks will never end.

What is Magnolia Based in Basel (Switzerland), Magnolia International Ltd. is the developer of Magnolia, the first commercial open-source enterprise content management (ECM) system to seamlessly integrate web content management and document management through one intuitive, web-based, AJAX-powered user interface.

Ruby on Rails (ROR) is a Ruby-based open-source framework for rapid Web application development. Both Rails and RIA communities are actively seeking convergence to offer integrated solutions. The Flex framework, Ruboss, is an example. InfoQ spoke with Peter Armstrong, the co-founder and CEO of Ruboss, to learn more.

Some time back Adobe announced an interesting new technology for image processing on GPUs called Hydra. That technology has since been renamed to Pixel Bender and components of it are now available for the CS4 products and Flash Player 10.

Ajax pros, especially in the Rails world, often know the Prototype and Scriptaculous JavaScript libraries inside and out. When faced with the prospect of writing on top of the competing jQuery framework, they may quickly stumble upon seemingly missing features. The culprit? jQuery's less-is-more approach. jQuery relies on multiple plugins to keep up with the Joneses. Here's a quick stab at how to trick out jQuery.

A short how to on implementing a REST service with WCF.

Eclipse has a Plug-in Registry view, which shows the state of all plug-ins in the running instance of Eclipse. But what if you need to analyze a crashed application to see what was deployed on it? Or, like in my case, need to understand a certain bundle dependency in RCP-application that has no Plug-in Registry view?

Succinct wisdom for Java EE architect Adam Bien.

Spring Python has just released 0.9.0. This release includes a key update to springpython.security.web module, where authorization has been patched to support CherryPy 3.1. Sylvain helped by providing key patches to integrate Spring Wiki with CherryPy 3.1, and I adapted these to support the PetClinic app. This valuable feature will help demonstrate all the various features of Spring Python during the "Introduction to Spring Python" demo scheduled later this week during the SpringOne conference.

Hibernate Search complements Hibernate Core by enabling full text search queries on persistent domain models, and brings Lucene search features to the Hibernate world. This refcard explains installation and configuration, and covers Mapping entities, bridges, building indexes, querying them and examining their contents.

In case you missed it, rails 2.2 recently got released, finally promising thread safety among some other things. Thread safety has always been neglected by the rails core team, the standard way to scale up in rails (pre 2.2) is to run multiple processes, which makes deployment a lot harder (I think there’re at least 10 different ways to deploy rails apps at the moment, and people still come up with new solutions: apache+fcgi, mongrel, mongrel_cluster, thin, phusion, rack…).

In most cases, you don't need a separate class to define a DataLoader and another separate class to define a DataNode. So in 6.5, the DataLoader is registered (by the New File Type wizard) in the layer, without being created as a Java class, while the DataNode isn't created by the New File Type wizard either.

One of the little known javascript events is the image “onError” event. This event is triggered when an image 404’s out because it doesn’t exist. Broken images can make your website look unprofessional and it’s important to fix broken images as soon as possible. I’ve created a MooTools / PHP script that listens for image errors, triggers an Ajax call to a PHP script, and that PHP script sends an email letting me know about the problem.

Combination of JavaFX and Portlet 2.0 technologies make it possible to develop portlets that can live outside of a portal page and outside of a browser and run as desktop applications. JavaFX can be used to develop very rich UI, thus can be used as client-side presentation technology.