log4p

A couple of weeks ago a I read about the free online Ruby course by Satish Talim. The course is aimed at people who want to start learning Ruby. I’ve probably passed the ’starting stage’ a while ago, but was intrigued and registerd (as did over 2000 enthousiasts from all over the globe).
At the beginning […]

I attended Joshua Blochs' presentation on closures at JavaPolis last week (watch the video here). This slides about return not return from what you'd expect kept me wondering: how do other languages solve this 'problem'.
The example from Bloch, taken from Slide 38 of Blochs' closures controversy presentation:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVA:

static <E> Boolean contains(Iterable<E> seq, {E => Boolean} [...]

Recently the Groovy team introduced a new operator to the Groovy language. It is called the Elvis operator. There is one thing I particularly like about this operator. It's name.
To bad the Elvis operator is only a shortening of Java's ternary operator, written like ?:. One use-case for the operator is returning a 'sensible default' [...]

Wicket 2 (Martijn Dashorst)
I knew that a talk labeled ‘Wicket 2’ was a bit suspicious. There is no such thing (anymore) as Wicket 2, the latest release is 1.3 and upcoming is 1.4. I have played around with Wicket a bit in the past and knew a bit about it at forehand. Martijn didn’t really [...]

Keynote
The opening keynotes seem to involve quite a bit of Adobes’ Flex this year. I must say I’m getting less skeptical, the upcoming version of parleys.com (presented by Stephan Janssen) which is build in Flex and Air (for being able to look at presentations offline) looks extremely cool. Some screenshots of Parleys V2 can be [...]

This year I visited Javapolis for the second time. I won’t even try to write an accurate journal of everything I’ve seen/heard; it’s just to much. I did however make some notes and pictures to give you an impression of the conference.
Opening Keynotes
Javapolis 2007 is sold out with over 3200 visitors from around the globe [...]

Over the weekend I've put some time in creating a basic SOA and ESB stencil for Omnigraffle. I'm pleased with the results:

I've decided the give the stencil its' own page containing more details, the and installation guidelines and will try to provide future updates to it.

I couple of days ago I was looking at XML parsing solutions available in Ruby. I played a bit with REXML, a conformant but kind of dull XML processor, it works great. When working with less conformant XML-like (like websites) data it might just not be what you're looking for. Luckily ruby demi-god and respected [...]

Today I was fiddling with Rails to create a simple web UI on top of some REST services. Therefor I didn't really need (or is it really didn't need) a database server. Just writing and running Rails code without a database isn't a problem. Running unittests (and rspec tests) however is a problem. By default [...]

In my previous post I had a go at dates and ranges in Groovy. I wasn't to enthusiastic about the fact that it felt a bit verbose and Java-ish. So I took the opportunity to have a go at the new meta-programming stuff in Groovy >= 1.1beta3.
Say I want to be able to do something [...]