Java Thinking

I've just released grails-jsunit-0.3 - a plugin which adds jsunit support to grails applications. This release changes the download url for the jsunit binaries to http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/jsunit/jsunit2.2alpha11.zip, and is upgraded to grails-1.0.3. When you install the plugin, it will download the jsunit binaries from the url above to $GRAILS_HOME/downloads - if it fails, you can manually download it and put it there. Hopefully this release fixes some problems described on the forums . Note though, that I haven't had any luck running jsunit with FireFox 3 - a problem that is referenced here .

I've just released http://blogs.morehappydogs.com/ - this is a AppEngine / Groovy blend - the application aggregates blog posts about dogs. If you are interested in dogs, check it out. The web tier is build with AppEngine in Python . AppEngine supplies the database via Datastore. Since you can't run jobs within appengine, I wrote services in Groovy which process the feeds and upload new entries. This groovy code runs as a script on my linux server, scheduled with cron . This approach suits me well, since I'm no Python expert, and I do like groovy. This keeps the appengine (python) minimal and essentially just the web/presentation layer. Using groovy for the backend services means I can use my Java experience and benefit from the productivity of groovy.

I've just released a new version (0.5) of the selenium plugin , which fixes compatibility problems with Grails 1.0.3. Hopefully all is well now and I'd like to apologise to all the users out there who ran into problems. If you encounter any more issues, you can email me at paul@javathinking.com. On another note, it would be cool to know how much a plugin is being used. For example, I've got no way of knowing if anyones actually using any of the plugins I've written so its hard to prioritise work. Perhaps we need a download counter to give a rough indication... ?

I use SQLDeveloper when interacting with Oracle . When viewing tables with date columns it can be frustrating that the default display does not show time (just day, month and year). To change this behaviour, you can set the date format for your current session: alter session set NLS_DATE_FORMAT='DD-Mon-YYYY HH24:MI:SS' Now, when you view tables or resultsets, you'll have a more precise view of the data: 04-Sep-2008 09:07:51