Finally Grails

It sure took me long enough, but I finally got around to writing about Grails. This article gives some introduction to Grails, but also talks about using Grails with Geronimo. The most valuable info in there might be the Geronimo deployment plan. This shows which packages to exclude from Geronimo's classpath when deploying a Grails application. This prevents classpath implosion.

New Articles on IBM

There's a couple of new articles that I wrote that are now available on IBM developerWorks:

The Geronimo renegade: Using integrated packages: Codehaus' Woodstox: This is an article all about Geronimo's StAX implementation, Woodstox. If you're an old veteran of XML parsing like I am, you have to love StAX. Woodstox is not only an excellent StAX implementation, it is a killer piece of software. We use it in a lot of places at eBay because it is so fast.

Use JavaScript to make your XForms more robust: This is a very cool article about mixing JavaScript and XForms together. XForms has become kind of a forgotten technology, which is a real shame. It has so much to offer. I think part of the reason it is forgotten is because people don't realize that it is standardized and integrated with other technologies. It plays nice. It's not some one-off technology that lets you do some cute things in a sandbox. This article shows how everything in the XForms world is accessible through JavaScript. It's not a read-only kind of access either. You can modify models and forms, etc. I'm planning on writing some more on XForms and how it integrates with a certain well known AJAX framework that is usually referred to as a three letter acronym...

Geronimo Plugin Tutorial

I posted yesterday that the GWT tutorial I wrote is now on the developerWorks. I didn't even realize it, but another tutorial I wrote was published last week as well. I wrote a tutorial on Geronimo plugins for IBM. It was actually a really fun tutorial to write. I think Geronimo's plugin architecture has a lot of exciting possibilities. In some ways it's a natural progression in terms of modularity. I always think of JBoss as folks who really recognized the possibilities opened up by making JBoss so modular via it's JMX based architecture. Geronimo's GBean architecture is a natural improvement, and it's what makes the plugin architecture possible. So check out the tutorial to see how easy and open the architecture is.