theJavaJar.com

I recently signed up with a Java hosting provider. I needed to put something together to prove to myself and clients that Grails would be a viable solution to create some quick custom applications. I have seen Groovy and Grails do some great things and I have written a few applications to test the technology, but I have mostly run the applications in hosted mode.

I thought that a good test would be to create a simple account/address/contact management application because that is a pretty common business application. I just kept it in line with what I have seen out there and I was guided by some requirements in my head. It is really simple, but it is definitely prettier, more intuitive, and easier to maintain than a lot of code I have seen that has taken 10x longer to build.

I spent about 8-10 hours putting it together and running it through some tests. I spent another 1-2 hours getting it deployed on my JBoss 4 server with a MySQL JNDI datasource configured and managed within JBoss. I don’t think the application will change the world, but it just confirms my belief that Grails is an incredible technology/tool set that keeps you focused on solving business problems rather than fighting technology.

url: http://www.axiomaticit.com/accountManager
email: admin@admin.com
password: admin

JavaOne is going full blast as I type and I am here blogging about it from the opposite side of the country. It would have been great to go this year, but I have a few priorities I need to take care of before I spend $2500+ to eat, sleep, and breathe Java for a week. I have heard and read that JavaFX is a big point of focus for this year’s event but unfortunately I feel like I am still waiting for the big “AHHH” moment because I have yet to see a demo that is going to impress me after being exposed to technologies like Flash. I guess I will have to wait and see. Well, hopefully some friends of mine, James Williams or Vladimir Vivien, will bring me a shirt (XL or XXL) or some kind of Java swag that will help me look cool.

So I have heard and read a little bit about the growing adoption of Macs in corporate culture. The first thing that comes to my mind is sure, why not? Now I know there are a large number of MSCE’s clasping to there certifications and screaming “No Way!”. Look, I appreciate and value the MSCE support staff at every place I have worked and I appreciate their knowledge base, especially when my 9-5 machine has problems. The key here is that this is not a battle of OS’s, this is about choice and allowing users to use what helps them get more work done.

I am currently a Java developer working mostly with Web technology and if I didn’t have to use an IDE that is coupled with a scrambled egg of an application server, I would be writing code on a Mac. Do I think it can be done? Yeah, I might need to have a Windows machine around to support some of the applications that I need for the legacy systems, but eventually the legacy systems will be put to sleep. I guess I might need the Windows machine for my email client because it would not run on OS X, but I am pretty sure I could just use another email client on my Mac. I already move my calendar appointments into Google Calendar because my email client’s calender is buggy.

I have been off of Microsoft Office for over a year now and off of Outlook for over two years on my personal machine but Office still invades my corporate life. I still have a VM of Windows running under Parallels just in case I need IE for something, but that is rare. I am more likely to be running a VM of Ubuntu in Parallels to get more friendly with Linux and what it has to offer. Again, I do not hate Windows, it has it’s place, but if I do not need it, why would I use it?

I understand that the infrastructure in each corporate environment has to be prepared to deal with multiple OS’s and there are security and support concerns that cannot be put in place overnight, but it is something to think about. If user A can get the job done working on OS X on a Mac and user B would like to use a flavor of Linux, then why not make the users happy? There is obviously a cost involved with this kind of decision and for some businesses, they want to stick to what they know best. There will be a point and time when we are all going to work with less of a dependency on a platform or operating system and it won’t be a battle of operating systems, it will be a matter of preference.