Entries from January 2008 ↓

Less than a week after releasing version 1.5.2, the Groovy team has announced 1.5.3. Apparently, 1.5.2 contained some regression bugs that have since been worked out. This is a minor bug-fix only release.

In other Groovy news, The Server Side has an interview with Dierk König regarding Canoo and testing with Groovy.

Google and Facebook are competing for the years top Computer Science graduates and are apparently offering kids $95,000 a year to come work for them. This seems a bit extreme to me, especially considering the pool of experienced talent being laid off from Yahoo! recently. Then again, a rockstar programmer with lots of energy can really help a team out. I won’t mention what my first job out of college paid

Smashing Magazine presents the ten principles of effective web design today. Good advice that will come in handy during the foojam redesign coming up in the next few days.

Wake Up Later has an interesting blog post regarding eight design mistakes programmers often make. FooJam.com is an example of what this article is trying to prevent As a developer myself, I often struggle with design and user interfaces. This article provides some good advice.

Jason McDonald posted some quick reference diagrams for the Gang of Four design patterns on his site today. Each section has the name of the pattern, a quick description, and the class diagram for the pattern. Definitely a handy thing to have around.

DZone has an interview with Ian Roughley about his new book, “Practical Apache Struts 2“. For those of you burned by Struts 1’s unruly struts-config.xml file and ActionForms, Struts 2 is a pleasant surprise and definitely worth checking out.

Ajaxian had a nice writeup today about Adobe AIR and it’s gaining popularity. Though Adobe is claiming cross-platform support, it is important to note that Linux is not supported. (though they are promising a Linux version shortly after the 1.0 release).

Arc is a new dialect of Lisp that has been in development by Paul Graham (of Y Combinator) since 2001. Paul has written several articles mentioning Arc over the years. Congratulations on the first release! From the  announcement, it sounds a bit unstable (it is described as “usable”), but should be good for poking around in and getting a flavor for the language.

Groovy 1.5.2 was released today. This is being called a bug-fix release, but there are a few new features as well. Check out the announcement here and the release notes here.

Guillaume Laforge, project lead for Groovy, has a new article on Groovy Zone called “From Java to Groovy in a Few Easy Steps“. It’s a nice introduction for the Java developer whom is curious about Groovy and would like to get their feet wet.