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Grails Validation Constraints Quick Ref

This is an excerpt from a blog post by Gordon Dickens, Chariot Architect and Trainer (via Technophile Blog) After several iterations of Grails, we have to go to 17 (seventeen) pages to see all the validation constraints? I wanted to see them on one page. Grails 1.3.5 – Validation Constraints blank – To validate that a String value is not blank. login(blank:false) creditCard – To validate that a String value is a valid credit card number. cardNumber(creditCard:true) email – To…

Monthly Mobile Musings from September

Firstly I should apologize for being a few days late, September was a busy month! I had the privilege and pleasure of joining a top notch panel discussion at ‘Mobile Monday Mid-Atlantic’ talking about mobile strategy. For anyone in the Philadelphia area interested/participating in mobile development, Mobile Monday is a must attend event, they have some great topics coming soon and we had a great attendance for the panel discussion again. My thanks again to MOMO-MA for the opportunity to…

Setting up TeamCity CI w/ Cucumber, Flex, FunFX, and Firefox in a Headless Environment: Part Two

Recently I had the “opportunity” (read: challenge) to setup a continuous integration build for a project with a Flex frontend and a Ruby/Rails backend. The project had been converted from Java-Hibernate-Tomcat to Ruby on Rails. Cucumber was introduced for GUI testing using the FunFX adapter. It was my first experience with Cucumber, so the combination of Cucumber, FunFX, Flex, and Firefox was a little daunting at first. But we got through it and actually, it turned out to be quite…

Setting up TeamCity CI w/ Cucumber, Flex, FunFX, and Firefox in a Headless Environment: Part One

Recently I had the “opportunity” (read: challenge) to setup a continuous integration build for a project with a Flex frontend and a Ruby/Rails backend. The project had been converted from Java-Hibernate-Tomcat to Ruby on Rails. Cucumber was introduced for GUI testing using the FunFX adapter. It was my first experience with Cucumber, so the combination of Cucumber, FunFX, Flex, and Firefox was a little daunting at first. But we got through it and, actually, it turned out to be quite…

Monthly mobile musings for August

August, appeared to me, to be the month of ‘Samsung’. They released/previewed/teased numerous handsets including the Seek, Flight II, Eternity II, Epic and Galaxy, and a few days ago released the Bada 1.0 SDK into the wild. Checkout the Samung Bada home for more details. There is also a developer book to go with it available via Amazon coming in September. More importantly they put up a teaser video for the ‘Galaxy Tab‘ which made me think I want one,…

Continuous Integration for iPhone

I was talking with a co-worker recently about Continuous Integration stacks for various platforms (because we are interesting like that, and because Chariot is running a CI event this fall). When we got onto the subject of iPhone he was surprised to hear how much of a complete stack was available, including unit, integration tests and full support for mocking, all of which we can bundle into our CI build. A brief run down of what we currently use: CruiseControl.rb…

Machine Learning: Google Prediction API

Loosely speaking, machine learning is using a computer to recognize patterns in data, and then make predictions about new data based on what it has learned. It is like a marriage between computer science and statistics. Besides its most obvious application (an army of sentient robots which wages war against mankind a.k.a. Skynet), there are a lot of uses for machine learning including: Predicting housing prices Recommendation engine for a retail website based on past customer purchases Spam filter or…

Why Open Source Can Mean Better Support

One of the first questions enterprise clients ask us when they evaluate an open source platform is, “How good is the support?” The assumption is that a commercial platform means reliable 24/7 support while open source means you’re more or less on your own. But the opposite is often true: Not only are many open source platforms backed by enterprise-grade professional support, they are also backed by communities of users ready to respond to questions over the web. Take the…

Mobile Musings from July

July seems to have been a busy month on many fronts in the world of mobile, then again, isn’t every month? Some hardware news that tickled my fancy: The continued hubbub around the Dell Streak: you can now sign up for an ‘exclusive’ 24 hour pre-sales period. It was also spotted on engadet running Android 2.1, was slated for a ‘July end’ release; but wait… It is currently on the Dell site for sale “soon”. BlackBerry bought the “BlackPad” domain,…

Spring Roo – News from Ken Rimple and Gordon Dickens

Chariot’s Ken Rimple and Gordon Dickens are following in the path of several of our architects – they are becoming published authors. Both are working, along with Ben Alex, on a book for Manning, Spring Roo in Action. Here is a video interview with them. They give a brief overview of Roo and discuss why they wanted to write the book. (sorry for the link, but YouTube was giving me trouble with the embedding today.) As they said in the…

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