(Sorry for the delay between shows lately.  It's the summer, and I was away on vacation...)

Especially THIS week, the opinions of Ken and Eric do not reflect the opinions of Chariot Solutions...

Speaking of this week, here are the links, found also on delicious.com at delicious.com/developernews/23

Links you can use!

• Release Notes - Grails - Version 1.3.4 - HTML format - jira.codehaus.org
• Headius: My Thoughts on Oracle v Google
• Quite the firestorm : On a New Road
• InfoQ: Oracle Sues Google Over Java in Android
• A List Apart: Articles: Good Help is Hard to Find
• Rails 3 Interview « Envy Labs

Blog / Podcast Disclosure:  we have partnered or worked in various capacities with a number of the companies mentioned in the show, including Sun, Oracle, Google and SpringSource.

Thanks to Kevin Griffin for joining Eric Snyder and myself this week.

Articles of interest

From http://www.delicious.com/developernews/2:

• Django and NoSQL Databases Revisited « myNoSQL
• Using PGP Encryption with Mule
• Chariot Solutions: Machine Learning: Google Prediction API
• Continuous Deployment, Code Review and Pre-Tested Commits on Digg4 ...
• Sharding in Grails | Groovy Zone
• Python Package Index : webapp2 0.2
• Getting started with Chef -- A tutorial
• Listen to Brian Fox discuss Maven 3 on BasementCoders.com
• Eclipse 4.0 SDK released - there is an updated tutorial available..

The Chariot DeveloperNews is sponsored by Chariot Solutions. In September we are running a number of training courses in the Spring Framework, including Enterprise Integration with Spring and Hibernate with Spring. We are also running two one-day Maven courses - an Intro and Advanced course. Check our course calendar at www.chariotsolutions.com/education.

We are pleased to release this recording of Linda Rising's talk on Deception and Estimation.  This is a one-hour talk, and is a good talk about how we deceive ourselves in a number of ways in life in general, and of course in the estimation process.

From the abstract:

"Cognitive scientists tell us that we are hardwired for deception. It seems we are overly optimistic, and, in fact, we wouldn’t have survived without this trait. With this built-in bias as a starting point, it’s almost impossible for us to estimate accurately.

That doesn’t mean all is lost. We must simply accept that our estimates are best guesses and continually re-evaluate as we go, which is, of course, the agile approach to managing change. Linda Rising has been part of many plan-driven development projects where sincere, honest people with integrity wanted to make the best estimates possible and used many “scientific” approaches to make it happen – all for naught. Re-estimation was regarded as an admission of failure to do the best up-front estimate and resulted in a lot of overhead and meetings to try to “get it right.” Offering examples from ordinary life – especially from the way people eat and drink – Linda demonstrates how hard it is for us to see our poor estimating skills and helps work with the self-deception that is hardwired in all of us."

Thanks to Linda Rising for speaking at ETE 2010 and letting us publish her talk.  

slides

In the DevNews today...

• CouchApp Evently Guided Hack w/ CouchDB
• Announcing djangoembed, rich media consuming and providing with Django
• Andres Almiray's Weblog : Weblog
• Daily Dose - Rails 3 Arrives at First RC Station
• Spring MVC 3 Showcase
• GORM Gotchas (Part 3)
• Michael Hartl’s Rails 3 Tutorial Book

Sponsor Moment:

We are sponsored / supported by our employer, Chariot Solutions, a leader in development and integration services in areas such as Java, Spring, Flex and Ruby on Rails.  Visit chariotsolutions.com/education to see our online training calendar.  We're hosting courses in Spring and Maven this fall.  Check us out today.

Podcast Disclosures:

We are partners with SpringSource, SonaType and Engine Yard, all of whom which may have been mentioned either directly or indirectly in this podcast.

Ken & Eric

• Understanding iOS 4 Backgrounding and Delegate Messaging @ Dr. Touch
• mxcl's homebrew at master - GitHub
• Homebrew: OS X's Missing Package Manager | Engine Yard Ruby on Rails Blog
• amf.js – A Pure JavaScript AMF Implementation
• The Incredible, Growing, Commercial Hadoop Market — GigaOM Pro
• Another Chance To Win a TShirt: What Are The Major Milestones in Java Persistence? | Javalobby
• Eucalyptus Closes $20M Round
• Are You A Starter, A Finisher Or An Implementer? | Javalobby

For the full list of developer news URLs we considered, head over to delicious.com/developernews/20

Ken & Eric

Chariot Developer News Episode #19

Hosts: Ken Rimple and Eric Snyder

The watchword this week is Release... Many releases upcoming or out, including FireFox 4 beta/preview 1, Tomcat 7 beta 1, and the upcoming Passenger 3 and GMail with HTML 5.

Links are not being loaded to delicious yet, so here they are in their glory!

• MRHaki on Groovy and clearing time from a date.
• The Road to Passenger 3.
• Firefox 4 Article.
• Apache Tomcat 7 Beta 1 is released!
• The Memory Leak protection article Ken was babbling on about.
• The mrhaki article on Spock.
• The Spock Project Page.
• Eight Open-Source Business Models.
• HTML 5 Coming to GMail.

Bonnie Aumann is an agile project manager and customer advocate for Algorithmics. Her ETE 2010 talk is entitled "Are your developers BS'ing you?" In this talk, she tries to cut through the potential blame game and IT culture issues by practicing rapid feedback and response, and Agile techniques.

Her abstract

"A question I’m often asked is how a non-technical manager like me can tell when their software team is pulling one over on them. This seems to be especially true of enterprise managers and points to structural problems with command and control development methodologies. The principlesof whole team interaction and the practices of rapid feedback and response in Agile seem to create an alternative culture in which things "just work."

Explicit tag warning

You'll hear the word "B.S." in long form several times in this talk, so anyone offended by this term should not tune in. However, it's done in context, and is very tasteful.

Resources

• Bonnie's presentation page: http://ow.ly/24myk
• The Tree Cartoon: http://ow.ly/24mzq
• Slides from the discussion : http://ow.ly/24mAl
• The Cocktail Party Effect: http://ow.ly/24mBp
• Servant Leadership: http://ow.ly/24mCe
• Bonnie Aumann on Twitter: twitter.com/bonniea

Today's episode is #18.  We discuss a number of technologies.  LINKS, provided by the code snippet below!

• Git Reference
• Cloud Performance Comparison
• Pyro 4.0 released
• Google I/O 2010 - BigQuery and Prediction APIs
• Groovy++ in action: DSL for embedding HttpServer | Groovy Zone
• 11 Creative Ways to Avoid Becoming a Workaholic
• Groovy/Grails Talk - Adding Feeds With Grails Plugins
• Groovy Goodness: Strip Leading Spaces from Lines with Margin - Messages from mrhaki
• Five Really Handy Google Command Line Tricks

GEEK OUT!

If you're curious, here's how we fetched and converted the list from delicious rss using Groovy Console

def feed = new XmlSlurper()
      .parse("http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/developernews/18")
  println "<ul>" 
  feed.channel.item.each { feedData ->
      println "<li><a href='${feedData.link}' " +
       ">$feedData.title</a></li>"    
  } 
println "</ul>"
return null 

Enjoy,

Ken & Eric

PS - Standard disclosure:  Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource partner.

Our ETE 2010 Session today is "Influencing your way to Agile" by Audrey Troutt. Audrey Troutt is a Software Engineer at the Drexel Math Forum.  She can be reached on twitter at @auditty.

In this talk, Audrey describes ways to approach your team members, bosses, bosses bosses, and other types in a more productive, influential way.  She discusses common pitfalls and traps, and the talk is very informative as well as entertaining. At the end of the session she takes audience questions.

Her slides are available online.

ETE Session #6 is "Write Once, Run on Any Phone"

A session with Chariot's Aaron Mulder and Kevin Griffin.

They discuss three popular mobile frameworks that allow developers to write the software one time and deploy it to each phone platform supported by the framework.

Rhodes, Titanium and PhoneGap are featured.

Slides for the presentation can be found here.

In Part 1, Joel discussed licensing models.  In this episode, Joel and Ken talk about the other criteria in his selection process.  

Criteria

• License model - See BusinessCast Episode 3
• Code Quality
  • JavaNCSS - Free tool (and maven plugin) to analyze lines of code / number of methods, MCCabe metrics etc...
  • JDepend - analyzes and checks for cyclic dependencies
• Runtime Analysis
  • Do a performance test - check CPU, memory, I/O peaks, etc...
• Design
  • Grade all software by reading the code, checking for code smell, etc. Set a short timebox to see if you can review the code and see structure, organization, etc...
  • Pay attention to Bob Martin's four design principles
  • Can you understand how they organized the code?
• Project Velocity
• Pedigree
• Community
• Market Penetration - ohloh.net is a good tool here
• Documentation quality - can you read the docs?  Read the code and understand how the docs relate?  Dev, admin, test, install, etc.?
• Support
• Functionality and Features

Enjoy the podcast!

Joel and Ken

Today my guest is Chariot's Joel Confino.  He's worked as a consultant with a variety of open source technologies, including Java and Spring, for more than a decade.  Joel has been called upon by management types on various clients to advise in matters such as open source project selection, which can be a thorny process. Today we discuss an open source evaluation and selection process that he has developed and has been made available for review in a public journal (see below).

This is a two-part series.  In the first part, Joel lays out his selection criteria and why he feels most other selection processes are not comprehensive enough for the unique world of open source software.  We then dive into a very informative discussion of open source license models, including the GNU Public License, the Lesser GPL, the Apache license, and variations thereof.

Of course we aren't lawyers, so always consult one before making legal agreements.  But I think if you don't know a GPL from a LGPL, it's definitely worth listening to this talk.

Joel's research, also part of his Master's Thesis in Computer Science, is published in IGI Global's International Journal of Strategic Information Technology and Applications, and is available for $30 online by the publisher.  Disclosure: Joel is not compensated for purchases of this paper.

In part 2, we discuss the other criteria, including code quality, project velocity, pedigree, community, market penetration, and more. We will spend a significant amount of time discussing both static and dynamic analysis of code.  Look for that to be released in a few days.

Today's ETE 2010 Session is another panel discussion:

Social Media - why should I care? (session details).

Panelists:

• Skip Shuda - CEO, Team and a Dream
• Chip Rodgers - VP and COO, SAP
• Adam Coomes - President, Infegy
• Erik Harbison - Senior Director of Interactive Marketing, TrueAction
• Ken Rimple - Director of Education, Chariot Solutions

Disclosure: Chariot Solutions collaborates on social media efforts with Team and a Dream

Our development news episode today is brought to you by the letter 'C'.  C is for Cloud.

Links:

• Using gradlew (the Gradle Wrapper) for Easy Gradle Execution: http://mrhaki.blogspot.com/2010/05/gradle-goodness-use-gradlew-for-easy.html
• Cucumber, a brief overview: http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/joeydotnet/archive/2010/06/01/cucumber.aspx
• Using OpenID authentication on App Engine: http://blog.notdot.net/2010/05/Using-OpenID-authentication-on-App-Engine
• What's a plugin-oriented architecture (Grails plugins and web slices):  http://blog.springsource.com/2010/06/01/whats-a-plugin-oriented-architecture/
• Using SpringSource Tool Suite 2.3.3.M1 with Roo and GWT: http://blog.springsource.com/2010/06/02/using-springsource-tool-suite-2-3-3-m1-with-roo-and-gwt/
• The Self Destruct File: http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2010/05/the-selfdestruct-file.html
• Recording of Grails/Terracotta webinar... : http://dave-klein.blogspot.com/2010/05/recording-of-grails-terracotta-webinar.html
• Watch AS34J - ActionScript for Java Developers by James Ward: http://www.jamesward.com/2010/05/17/watch-as34j-actionscript-3-for-java-developers/

Upcoming Events @ Chariot:

• Hans Dockter on Gradle - Chariot Pizza and Beer night 6/11/2010 @ 5PM in Fort Washington, PA.  It's a twofer - we're running this as a Philadelphia Groovy Grails User Group session as well.  Details:  http://www.phillygroovy.org/calendar/13662235/ hurry!  Seating is limited to 25.
• Introduction to Maven and Maven Intermediate training at Chariot 6/15 & 6/16, 2010
• From Zero to Rails 3 - Rails training w/Engine Yard using pair programming and pair training techniques!  Save $800 off the normal price for this one-time introductory offer.

Today's ETE 2010 session is a panel discussion I chaired on mobile application development.  Panelists were:

• Adum Blum - @AdamBlum - RhoMobile, a re-targetable mobile application development platform
• Joe Conway - Big Nerd Ranch (Apple mobile developer, trainer, mentor, co-author of iPhone Programming)
• Andrew Oswald - Chariot Solutions, developer of the ETE Android application representing Android development
• Kevin Griffin - Chariot Solutions, mobile developer, with interests in open source mobile application development tools, experience with Blackberry, iPhone development

Enjoy.

Ken

Your bi-(hopefully)weekly dish of developer news, served up fresh and hot.  Well, ok, one day later than originally recorded.

An un-expergated version of the links is available at http://delicious.com/developernews/16

Links

• My Common Git Workflow - http://yehudakatz.com/2010/05/13/common-git-workflows/
• PyPy - what a name - Python written in Python.  How very meta of you!  http://alexgaynor.net/2010/may/15/pypy-future-python/
• Django 1.2.1 released - now with multi-database love. http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2010/may/24/121/
• Dive into HTML 5.  FANTASTIC web site that goes through the history of HTML, and what HTML 5 is all about.  Also a forthcoming book.  http://diveintohtml5.org/
• 7 lessons learned while building reddit - http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/5/17/7-lessons-learned-while-building-reddit-to-270-million-page.html
• Flex and Java Differences:  Getters and Setters.  Flex has properties, Java doesn't.  Read up.  http://www.jamesward.com/2010/05/07/flex-and-java-differences-getters-setters/
• Java exceptions and Flex - Cornel Creanga on DZone - actually talking about BlazeDS and Java exceptions - http://css.dzone.com/news/java-exceptions-and-flex
• Upcoming sessions on Rails Conf from RailsEnvy - http://blog.envylabs.com/2010/05/rails-3-tutorials/
• Maven 3.  3? Wait a minute!  Yes, 3.  What's new in Maven 3.0 from Matthew McCullough - summarized by Matt Raible.  http://java.dzone.com/articles/whats-new-maven-30-matthew

Chariot Training Events (shameless but relevant plug) related to the show

• June 15 - Sonatype Maven 101 - Introduction @ Chariot in Philly
• June 16 - Sonatype Intermediate Maven 201 - Learn about CI tools, repositories, site reporting, plugins, multi-module projects more.
• June 22-24 - From Zero to Rails 3 with Engine Yard - A complete Rails 3 for beginners course, taught on our fab 22" iMac machines, pair programming AND pair teaching!  Save over $800 now on introductory course pricing.  Hurry, space is limited.
• Official SpringSource Core Spring 3.0 training August 10-13 - A chock-full course from SpringSource on Spring, including overviews on Spring Security, remoting, ORM, AOP, and more.

Partners discussed in this podcast:

• Sonatype
• SpringSource
• Engine Yard

Today we speak with Boris Bokowski, a committer on the Eclipse Platform UI project, and a Senior Software Engineer at IBM.  His participation in Ecilpse dates back to Eclipse 1.0, when he coded the CVS client for the IDE.

We discuss Eclipse e4, an incubator for new technologies on the Eclipse project.  There are several new features coming as a result of e4, including:

• A new dependency injection framework for Eclipse bundles, based on the Java platform Dependency Injection JSR
• A new Rich UI tool, built on Eclipse, that lets developers put together rich client platforms using Eclipse and the dependency management platform
• A new eGit Eclipse git integration tool

For more information, visit eclipse.org/e4

To read about Boris Bokowski and what he is working on, you can visit his blog:  borisoneclipse.blogspot.com

It has been quite a dry spell in podcast land for the listeners.  We've been recovering from running Philly ETE last month, and are just starting to dig out.  Content will now start coming out in regular frequency again on the Techcast. *Phew!*

This DevNews edition is more of a housecleaning of links than before.  The full list we put up there is at delicious.com/developernews/15, but we only cover about 9 links or so...

News Items (covered today)

• Zen Coding - templates for a variety of IDEs for HTML/CSS productivity - here is the IntelliJ article
• Ruby Equality - Do YOU know the four types of Ruby equality check?
• Netbeans 6.x Java EE 6 quickstart on netbeans.org
• SpringSource new announcements - RabbitMQ purchase, GemStone purchase, Webflow 2.1.0 milestone 1 release, and read up on Spring's Spring EL feature in Spring 3.0
• Actor-based concurrency with Python using Pysage
• Microsoft embracing HTML5 and CSS3 for IE 9.0!  H.264 hardware-enabled encoding for Windows Mobile is coming...  BTW, here's WebKit's main page.
• The RedCar JRuby IDE
• 7 Reasons to Hate Your Code by Yield Thought
• Testing your GWT Code

The usual podcast disclaimer:  The opinions expressed on the DevNews are those of the participants, and not official positions of Chariot Solutions.  Also, we discuss a few technologies from our partners.  Partners of Chariot Solutions include

• SpringSource / VMWare
• JBoss, a division of Redhat
• Engine Yard

Panelists today:  Ken Rimple & Eric Snyder

Sorry for the late notice, gang.  Since I run the techcast and I'm consumed with various education admin / teaching responsibilities this week, we're going to take a break for one week.  We will resume next week, and will also start pushing some ETE podcasts as well. Stay tuned, and as always, thanks for listening to the techcast!

Until we can load the show notes, please visit 

http://delicious.com/developernews/14

Thanks,

Ken, Eric & Gordon

We held an open podcast on the evening of April 8th at the happy hour reception of the 2010 Philly Emerging Tech show.  I had invited James Ward and Michael Cote to sit with me, and see what developed.  Well, beyond the happy hour food and beer, which flowed freely, so did the conversation.  Adam Coombs from Infegy sat down with us, and later Ed Burns from Oracle joined the table.

We had a great time with a wide ranging conversation.  I hope you enjoy it.

Standard disclaimer for a live broadcast:  Of course, the opinions expressed are our own, influenced by food and beer, and not those of our employers...

Links

• All about Philly Cheesteaks (mmm, yummy!)  
• The banning of cross-compilers by Apple in the new iPhone SDK
• Reminisce about your first computer and check out THIS cool site  
• The Turbo button 
• We podcasted from the Sheraton Society Hill who set up a nice podcasting table, complete with electric and a steady stream of beverages,  in South Philly  - thanks for the hospitality! 

Guests

• Adam Coombs of Infegy http://www.infegy.com/ 
• Ed Burns of Oracle 
• James Ward of Adobe 
• Michael Cote of Redmonk

Thanks everyone!

Chariot TechCast ETE Podcast #2 - the Web Framework Shootout of 2010

Warning: NSFW

Our last web framework shootout at ETE was in 2008, and we felt it was high time for another meetup. Since then, Rails and Merb have merged, JSF 2.0 was released, Grails has become more mature, Spring has moved into annotation-driven configuration in a big way, and there are still a ton of choices for an architect to make when choosing a web framework.

This year the shootout is led by Robert Hanson, author of Manning's GWT In Action, who was a speaker on last year's podcast. This is a Not Safe For Work download, as it involves some cursing and stronger statements, but overall it's no worse than you'll hear when meeting up with a few of these guys at a bar.

Slides have been published by Robert on his website.  We will have them soon as well as a large number of slide decks at chariotsolutions.com/downloads/presentations.

Speakers in this shootout include, in no particular order:

• Chris Richardson of Cloud Foundry/SpringSource/VMware
• Dan Allen and Lincoln Baxter III of JBoss, a division of RedHat
• Alex Payne of Twitter
• David Black of Cyrus
• Scott Davis of Thirsty Head
• Yehuda Katz of Engine Yard
• Jeremey Grelle of SpringSource/VMware
• Ed Burns of Oracle

All told, we have representatives arguing for Rails, Grails, Seam, CDI, Spring, Spring MVC and JSF, but also discuss JavaScript "we are solving problems from 10 years ago," component abstraction -vs- scripting on the page, the eternal Java versus Ruby debate, and many more.

Music for the podcast was performed by Chariot's Andrew Oswald.

Lots of topics this week.  Shownotes are available on delicious.com/developernews/13 as well. Submit your story ideas as tag "devnewsideas" and we'll look for them before each show.

• South 0.7 Released
• Python 2.7 Release
• The future of CSS: The Flexible Box Model
• MGG 254: Storage, AirDisk, 10.6.3 Woes, SD Cards, and WebKit
• Groovy 1.7.2 - Three Features Worth the Upgrade | Javalobby
• Mercurial: Early Thoughts | Javalobby
• [Not covered on the TechCast] Wow. This is big news. The father of Java has left Oracle : Time to move on... : On a New Road
• Spring batch has an upload facility that can take spring configuration data : Uploading Job Configurations to Spring Batch Admin | SpringSource Team Blog
• Jason Seifer has moved on and is doing a podcast called The Ruby Show with Dan Benjamin. The new show is at 5by5.tv/rubyshow, the existing railsenvy.com website is empty : Rails Envy

Thanks for listening.  You can head over to the DevNews forum at PhillyEmergingTech to leave feedback or discuss the show.  Forums:

Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource and EngineYard partner (relevant partners for this podcast episode.

Ken Rimple & Eric Snyder

Chariot Solutions TechCast - ETE 2010 Conference Session #1 - Keynote Session from Michael Coté, analyst from RedMonk

I first ran into Michael Coté's work back in 2008 when we put together the Chariot Cloud Con East conference. Among the many grandstanding blogs about cloud computing at the time, RedMonk was a place we could go to read about emerging trends, such as Platform as a Service and Software as a Service.

Useful links:

• Conference Abstract (including slides link)
• Michael Coté's RedMonk page
• Follow @cote on twitter…

Show notes available at 

delicious.com/developernews/12

Hope to see you at ETE 2010 - if not, please visit the techcast site, or chariotsolutions.com for news about show recordings and video.

Ken & Gordon

Bookmarks available on delicious.com/developernews/11

As always, social bookmarking on delicious.com for the devnews

delicious.com/developernews/10

However, here are the links...

Links:

• EIP 'Loan Broker' Reference Implementation (Part 1) | SpringSource Team Blog
• Guillaume Nodet's blog: Spring-DM, Aries Blueprint and custom namespaces
• Ehcache 2.0 Offers Grails Integration & Scaling Without Code Changes | IndicThreads
• Why doesn't (JPA, JMS, JTA, EJB, JSF, CDI) work? JEE is "Too …
• Google releases skipfish, an application security tool | Googling Google | ZDNet.com
• Grails Goodness: See Test Output on the Command Line - Messages from mrhaki
• SpringSource launches Tomcat Expert site

Follow us on twitter.  Official news:  @techcast and @chariotsolution - Ken Rimple is @krimple, Gordon Dickens is @gordonad

Partner Disclosures

• Chariot has consulting and/or education partnerships with SpringSource and JBoss

Steve Butler is the Program and News Director for KYW News Radio, a well-known AM news radio station broadcasting out of the Philadelphia region.  The station has adopted social media platforms such as Twitter and podcasting, in order to disseminate news items and provide longer-format content to their listeners.  Mr. Butler is interviewed by Tracey Welson-Rossman.

Due to all of my various time constraints, this is the "Brown Bag" edition of the Developer news - now without jazz!

Our show bookmarks can be found on:

www.delicious.com/developernews/9

Thanks,

Ken, Eric (apparently earlier I wrote Scott) & Gordon

Gradle is an application assembly and build management platform that provides for convention-based build processes like Maven, but also implements a dynamic, groovy-based scripting and plugin system to make it very easy to customize your builds and perform specific steps at any point along the way. My guests today are Hans Docter, who is the creator of Gradle, and Adam Murdoch who is a committer to gradle, and is the CTO of Gradle Inc, a company founded to support development teams working with gradle in the field.

Useful links

• The gradle.org website
• Adam and Hans' Gradle Inc. developer support site
• Follow Gradle news on twitter - @gradleorg on twitter

This is part one of a two-part series. 

Thanks for listening.  Our podcast audio themes are free theme #3 and #4 from podcastthemes.com

Follow us on twitter - and send your feedback to @techcast, or the #techcast hashtag.

Links to follow soon…  You can read the devcast bookmarks at

http://delicious.com/developernews/8

Thanks,

Ken, Brent, Eric and Gordon

Gradle is an application assembly and build management platform that provides for convention-based build processes like Maven, but also implements a dynamic, groovy-based scripting and plugin system to make it very easy to customize your builds and perform specific steps at any point along the way.

My guests today are Hans Docter, who is the creator of Gradle, and Adam Murdoch who is a committer to gradle, and is the CTO of Gradle Inc, a company founded to support development teams working with gradle in the field.

Useful links

• The gradle.org website
• Adam and Hans' Gradle Inc. developer support site
• Follow Gradle news on twitter - @gradleorg on twitter

This is part one of a two-part series. 

Thanks for listening.  Our podcast audio themes are free theme #3 and #4 from podcastthemes.com

Follow us on twitter - and send your feedback to @techcast, or the #techcast hashtag.

Developer news segments are a weekly program, run by Chariot's application developers and architects.  This week we discuss PyCon 2010 with Eric Snyder.

Links can also be found on delicious.com at delicious.com/developernews/7

Submitting a news link?  Just add one with the public tag 'devnewsideas' and we'll try to incorporate it into the show.

Note:  Sorry about the audio in this show - we need to set up better mics for a multi-guest recording...

Links for this show:

• PiCloud | Cloud Computing. Simplified.
• PyCon 2010 Videos
• Relative Popularity of languages in job market
• The Rails Upgrade Handbook
• Using a Codec in a Grails unit test
• Flex Performance on Mobile Devices
• An introduction to GPARS
• Building Portable RIAs with Flex and PDF

Thanks from Ken, Brent, Eric and Gordon!

All DevNews bookmarks are available at 

  delicious.com/developernews/6

Thanks for listening!

Ken & Brent

Peter Neubauer (Twitter :@peterneubauer) is the COO of Neo Technology and one of the founders of neo4j - a graph-based database engine.  We talked about the neo4j project and discussed how it can be used from Java and other languages as an alternative that can provide highly scalable access to related data.

Resources

• neo4j home page
• The top 10 ways to get to know neo4j
• Presentation landing page for Tobias Ivarsson - Python and neo4j at PyCon
• Social querying with Gremlin, the Graph Programming Language project - example using DBPedia
• How gremlin and neo4j work together 

Sponsorship:  Our sponsor this week is the Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference.  Early bird registration is extended - get your tickets this week - more information, including our schedule, is available at phillyemergingtech.com.  Speakers include Uncle Bob Martin, Michael Cote, and many, many others.

You can find the articles we've bookmarked at Delicious.com.  Our URL for this week is:

delicious.com/developernews/5

As always, you can bookmark items of interest on delicious.com and add the tag "devnewsideas" and we'll try to incorporate them into the show.

Ken & Brent

We have a bevy of good links this week.  As usual, Brent and Ken put together their favorite web links on delicious.  Review them here:  delicious.com/developernews/4

Sponsors from this episode include SpringSource, Sun, and EngineYard.

Chariot Developer News episode #3 - February 1 2010

News Links:

You can follow all of our links on Delicious.  Head over to delicious.com/developernews/3 for the details.

Disclaimers:

The opinions expressed by Ken and Brent do not necessarily form policy decisions at Chariot, for the US State department, or in the Federation of Planets...

Ah, disclosure law.  Partners discussed in the podcast:

• SpringSource
• EngineYard (forgot it in the audio stream but we talked about Rails 3)
• Sun (discussing the Oracle merger)

Feedback:

• Brent Baxter can be reached via his blog: brentbaxter.com or twittered at @brentbaxter
• Ken Rimple can be reached at the all-encompassing rimple.com, or via @krimple
• Send us feedback publicly using #techcast on twitter, or leave a comment on the blog, or privately via email (techcastfeedback at chariotsolutions.com).

Upcoming Events:

• Philly Emerging Tech - early bird special, save $$$ before February 15!  
• Philadelphia Spring User Group Meeting - February 11th - at Chariot Solutions, 515 Pennsylvania Avenue, Suite 202, Fort Washington PA.  Details at the Philly Spring site.

On this techcast, Brian Sletten describes how the Semantic Web helps to define relationships between interconnected data, discusses the various tools and APIs, and how it is already being used, even without our knowledge.

Services like Friend of a Friend (FoaF), tools like RDFa, query tools like SPARQL, are discussed. If you don't know what the Semantic Web is or why it exists, Brian gives us a good overview and it's worth time listening to. Today, the US Government, wikipedia, and other systems are making data available via these mechanisms, as well as online retailers like Best Buy and Tesco.

Sponsor - Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise April 8-9, 2010. Still time to register for the early bird special and save! Details at phillyemergingtech.com

Developer NewsCast #2 - January 25, 2010 Hosts: Brent Baxter and Ken Rimple Our news links can be found at http://delicious.com/developernews/2 Disclosures related to show content: Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource, Sun and JBoss Partner.

For our 50th episode, I sat down with VMWare/SpringSource's Jeremy Grelle, an Open Source developer who works on the Spring WebFlow project, among others. Jeremy will be speaking about Spring's BlazeDS integration library when he comes to town for the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference in April. We talk about Spring 3.0, and about the following APIs: Spring MVC Spring WebFlow Spring Faces Spring JavaScript Spring's BlazeDS Integration library for Rich Flex applications Thanks to Jeremy for coming on the show and taking the time to talk to us.

Venkat Subramaniam is a widely acclaimed speaker, author, professor, and creator of Agile Developer, a mentoring and training company. 

He joined us on the techcast to talk about programming using dynamic languages.  He is well known for his talks and book on the Groovy language, has just published a book on Scala, and discusses his philosophy for applying languages in our talk.

Mr. Subramaniam is speaking at the 2010 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise show, to be held on April 8-9 in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  To register, head over to phillyemergingtech.com.

Links:

1. Venkat's web site - http://www.agiledeveloper.com
2. Examples of Testing with Groovy -  http://www.agiledeveloper.com/presentations/testingWithGroovy.zip
3. A great book by Venkat on Programming Groovy
4. Venkat's Scala Book
5. Java world Article on DSL

Music today was provided by FreePodcastThemes.com (free theme #3 is our opener) and by Music Alley.  The takeout music was "Jazz Breakfast" from "Gecko 3".  Warning - if you download it has a few explicit words mixed in, but it's got a great groove!  Artist Information.

This is our first Developer News podcast episode. We hope you like it. Links can be found by browsing our Delicious tags. Head over to www.delicious.com/developernews/1 for the links that made up today's show. Leave us feedback on twitter with #techcast, or email techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com.

Joe Gregorio, Google Developer Advocate and member of the Google App Engine team, is also working on Google Wave, a new collaborative environment that mixes concepts from IRC, Mail, IM, and document sharing.

1. APIs http://code.google.com/apis/wave/
2. Example bots:  builtins:  Linky automatically makes links of text typed in to the wave. 
3. For more examples, look at wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com
4. Developers can sign up for sandbox access here https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignupfordev/
5. Non-Developers can request a preview account here https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/
6. No public client/server API yet, waveprotocol.org has links to wave protocol forum

Today's podcast features Jonas Bonér, the creator of the Akka framework.  If you've been listening to the podcast, especially to Episode #37 with Alex Miller on Java Concurrency, here is an alternative approach to providing scalability on the Java VM.

Akka features an implementation of Actors, Software Transactional Memory, and Transactors, a hybrid approach to working with STM inside of Actors themselves.  Jonas also provides a mechanism for writing these components inside of the Java language as well.

Actors are not a direct part of the Scala language. Rather, they are implemented as a library.  There are, in fact, at least three implementations.  Jonas Bonér's Akka framework includes actors as well as access to Software Transactional Memory.  In this episode, my colleague Jamie Allen and I interview Jonas to try to pull apart what Actors and Software Transactional Memory are, and how they can help developers write highly scalable, concurrent applications.

Links:

1. The Akka Mountain in Sweden (Akka is named after the mountain)
2. The Akka framework homepage is www.akkasource.org (or www.akkasource.com or even www.letitcrash.com)
3. A good blog entry about Akka 
4. The high level overview of Akka from the akkasource site
5. Jonas' home page and the Akka twitter handle

Today's interview features the Groovy luminary Guillaume LaForge.  Guiallume's work on improving the Groovy language paved the way for the innovative frameworks such as Grails and Griffon, and showed a whole generation of Java developers to stop worrying and love dynamic programming.

Guiallaume is the Groovy project lead, and is constantly improving the language.  One of his newer efforts is the App Engine framework Gaelyk.  Running on top of Groovy, this framework allows developers to build Google App Engine web sites with very little effort.  We talked to Guillaume about the project, and about his thoughts on Java 7 as well.  This week we took questions from the 'twitterverse', and I started using Google Wave to edit my show notes.   

Upcoming Groovy 1.7 features...

1. Support for anonymous inner classes (before suggested you use closures)
2. Providing an AST Builder, to make it easier to provide AST transformations (such as @Singleton, @Delegate).  AST transformations are compiled into bytecode.

Gaelyk - The Google App Engine framework

1. Groovlets, small groovy web scripts - just write a script!
2. Templates - separate Groovy code from view
3. Injects Google features into scripts, not abstract them too much
4. Sitemesh templating: Guillaume is researching sitemesh integration but likely not including it directly (providing instructions at some point)
5. Question asked by @wmacguyver on what Groovy
   
   1. DataStore was easy to wrap with a thin veneer - is hoping to more groovify and add a DSL around it
   2. Mail - added ONE method to enrich base class to make it eaiser to use from scripting
   3. Route support in 0.32 - was more work but not complex to do...
6. Asked about what projects running in Gaelyk - early days... but check out groovyconsole.appspot.com - a way of executing Groovy code online and sharing snippets.  Written by Guillaume.  Another one out there is a javascript toolkit for writing iphone web apps iui - demo app is built on Gaelyk (no link avaialble)
7. Also hosted on Gaelyk:  Gaelyk project itself
8. Community feedback - will drive some enhancements, obviously Guillaume is very committed to Groovy language too!
9. Users have become contributors - submitting suggested changes / patches, these are very welcome.
10. Future feature:   Querying support on deck potentially for datastore, simple SQL queries don't work on a NO-SQL database.

Question from twitter user @HamletDRC: @techcast Which JDK7 feature will effect Groovy the most: Closures, Jigsaw, or something else? (question for @glaforge)

Java 1.7 Closures -

1. The working document - mentions dynamic interfaces for closures, groovyc compiler could create same interfaces under the hood - could be interoperable POTENTIALLY...
2. Could we pass groovy closures to a java class?  No implementation yet, so we need to see how languages work together...
3. Java closures - cannot access non-final vars, etc... Shouldn't replace Groovy closures with Java closures...

Jigsaw (JDK modularity)

1. Interesting to investigate.  Would be nice to modularize Groovy a bit - maybe pull pieces into modules (groovlets, etc)... OSGi is an option as well, need to evaluate. 

Thanks also to lucaxtex for his tweet: lucastex @glaforge incredible work on #gaelyk UrlRoutes! This is getting sweeter each day :)