Tuesday, 4 March 2008

Guilder POC is released, Uff

As announced today at the LA-JUG I released the POC of the Guilder Project. You can read about it and also download the installer from: https://madplanet.com/trac/guilder

Basically Guilder indents to replace Maven 2 bringing back some of the great features of Maven 1 as well as adding new and hopefully cool features. The project is written in Groovy including the POM, the Plugins and the core code. Guilder builds itself using its own code.

This release is just a proof of concept and an invitation for you guys to give feedback to decide on the future of the project.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 8:58 PM in Groovy

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Saturday, 1 March 2008

Last Blog Entry before the Guilder Proof of Concept Release

After some back and forth with the Plugin management, dependent goals and trying to make the installation using IzPack work I am finally close to release the Proof of Concept Version of Guilder. The last step is to provide some example projects that a user can use to evaluate Guilder and to have some ideas on how to apply it to their projects if someone dares. Unfortunately the core build system is a bad example because I had to use some tricks to make it build itself and so I need to emphasis this on these files and also provide some other example that are better suited.keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 4:15 PM in Groovy

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Saturday, 23 February 2008

Groovy and GString Issues

I know I wasn't blogging for some time but I was quite busy with a lot of difficult stuff. In my day job I am working with Netbeans, Glassfish, Web Services, HTTPS, Flex and AspectJ as of late which most of them are quite new to me and take some time to get used to them. For Guilder I am dealing with some issues related to GString and how to deal with properties not yet available. In addition the object where Groovy is trying to resolve from depends on the part where the GString instance is defined. Unfortunately GString values are resolved right away and not when it is converted into a String (I guess it is converted into a String right away). Because I am going to merge properties from several POMs I need to delay that process.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 9:19 PM in Groovy

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Wednesday, 20 February 2008

Introduction to Groovy is available for Download

I just made the Introduction to Groovy Open-Office document available on my company's website. This discusses some of the features, tricks and pitfalls of Groovy using the Groovy-For-Open-Office plugin from Jim White. Please note that this document needs Groovy-For-Open-Office version 4 or higher because I use Groovy 1.5 rather than 1.0. The document contains the instruction on how to get going because GfOO 4/5 is not publicly released as o  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 9:28 AM in Groovy

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Saturday, 9 February 2008

Guilder Modules and Tests Problems are resolved

Sorry for the long silence but I was so busy with getting the module management in that I did not find time to blog. The basic problem was to make sure that I can inspect all modules, check the dependencies on other modules and determine the execution order. Then I need to execute the in this order. It somehow screwed up my idea of trying to use Plugins to handle POM Modules because it is deeply intrenched in the building process and needs at least two phases. I also had to change the way the build process is invoked to make it simpler to invoke the modules recursively. Eventually I made it  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 9:45 PM in Groovy

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Saturday, 2 February 2008

Guilder Properties are Up and Running

After some intense coding this Saturday I finally could make it work with the POM merging and calling a Plugin that handles that POM element. Now that this is off my list I can focus on more stuff. The next thing is to deal with the installation to make sure that the plugins are in its correct place so that I can start developing serious plugins. The installation must be part of the bootstrap because I don't want it to be in the core. The installation needs to create the Guilder directory in the user home directory, extract the plugins and make sure that everything works.

The challen  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:57 PM in Groovy

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Thursday, 31 January 2008

Guilder POM and Properties

One of the things I have most problems with is how to define the Project Object Model and then allowing users to set properties the Maven 1 way. I create a POM by just using a Groovy script that contains other POM elements and so creating the Object Model tree. The base instance each of the POMs' must extend is a POM class which also will contain a method that lets one POM being incorporated into another one. This method will add any properties and POM elements which are not already set in the other POM. I indent to allow 3 different POMs:

  • User level POM which is resides in the user's home directory
  • Project POM which is inside the project root directory
  • Local POM which is inside the project root directory allowing local settings and which should not be included into a VCS
  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 9:39 AM in Groovy

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Tuesday, 29 January 2008

First Major Step taken with Guilder

This morning after some frenzy coding the first demo of the Guilder worked and I could build Guilder with itself; hail scripting. There were several stepping stones along the way but most notable was using as little dependencies as possible and to make dependency downloading easy using Ivy. Still the project is far from an alpha release because it can only build itself with various hacks and tweaks. That said the major issues are at least sketched out and so I can focus on making things right. These are the next steps:

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:10 PM in Groovy

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Thursday, 24 January 2008

Playing and Learning Groovy can be Fun

A friend of mine Jim White has a little project called Groovy for OpenOffice and it indents to enable Groovy scripts execution within OpenOffice. Even though I don't indent to use scripting in my OpenOffice documents I found another nice and really fun usage for it which could also become a teaching tool for Groovy which is much more efficient that the good old Wiki.

The Groovy for OpenOffice comes with a demo document, Wings, which enables a user to create a Groovy paragraph in which he or she can add Groovy script and execute it right inside this paragraph and the output is listed below. If you are familiar with Mathematic then you know what I am talking about. The great thing is that anyone reading such a document does not have to copy and past the script code into, for example, Groovy Shell and then execute it and see what is going on. But it also enables the writer, as well as the reader, to annotate the code and discuss the output right on the same spot. This screenshot shows an evaluation of how in Groovy a programmer could intercept a method call similar to AOP and maybe change the call as we did:

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:57 PM in Groovy

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