Java Thinking

With my latest Griffon+JavaFX application, I wasn't having any luck binding a textfield to a 'float' property in my model. So to work around it temporarily, I've added a change listener which will veto any input that isn't a number. This example is basically using a very Java centric approach: Now, we can simplify this by using the Groovy way: See Groovy way to implement interfaces to understand how this is implementing the interface. If we want to have several text fields using the same logic, we can define the closure in the Controller and reference that in many places: Still, this is not optimal since I have to use Strings instead of Floats in my model - but it does let me continue with whats important right now. Hopefully the binding bug can be fixed soon.

If you're like me, you've got several years (and gigs) of digital photos that you've been copying off your cameras, your phone, your wifes phone etc. Tonnes of photos, all unsorted, and some times copied more than once. How do you go about sorting out the good photos - the ones you want to share with your family - from the ones that just aren't worth sharing? This is why I started working on vsPhotoSorter - at the moment it is minimalistic, just enough features to provide me with value - but its working for me as I steadily sort out my collection. If you have a similar problem with your photo collection, have a look and see if it helps you too. Read more here http://www.vamonossoftware.com/2013/01/sort-out-your-digital-photo-collection.html . This software is a desktop application built using  Griffon and  Groovy on the  Java platform.

The catalog of Groovy and Grails books keeps growing, so if you are in the market for some, check out these sources: Pragmatic programmer Grails Groovy Apress Grails Groovy Manning Grails in Action Groovy in Action On Amazon:

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.