I’m currently completing the finishing touches on a new e-commerce site for my wife’s stationary business. We decided a long time ago to use PayPal for all of the payment processing since we’ve had a great experience using it for our eBay selling. About a year ago Graeme Rocher polished off the last release of [...]

If you’ve ever worked with the brilliant Recaptcha service, you’ll know that their REST API requires an HTTP POST rather than a GET. As I had only used GET requests thus far, I googled around and found a pretty easy solution:

private def evaluateCaptcha(def remoteIp, def challenge, def response) {
def config = [...]

Ever wanted to do drag-n-drop sorting of a grid of images on a page and persist it? Here’s my solution using Grails, Prototype, and Script.aculo.us.
Basically what prompted this was the need for my wife to be able to sort the various product images that she had on a screen at any given time in [...]

A few days ago I pontificated on my need to choose a new “Language of the Year.” Right now I’m attempting to choose between Scala and Clojure. If nothing else, I’ve learned from this exercise that asking the community for feedback is a GOOD thing. Your comments have been very helpful.
To summarize:

As far as the [...]

In 2007 I established several professional development goals (and later reported my progress on these), one of which was to learn Groovy and Grails. This goal stemmed from the continually referenced idea from The Pragmatic Programmer to “learn a new language every year.” This idea has become so ubiquitous that it even has it’s own [...]

I recently gave a 90 minute talk at work covering quite a bit of ground related to Agile Software Development. If I had to sum up agile development in one word, it would be FEEDBACK. Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt give one of the best definitions of agile I’ve ever seen in their book, Practices [...]

Interesting title, eh? Maybe this one will make it through Glen’s filter at GroovyBlogs.org.
On to the meat. I’ve been steadily working on a couple of Grails applications, one being the website for the Memphis JUG, and another being the e-commerce site for my wife’s soon to be launched designer stationery business. Just like your average [...]

In finishing up the first release of JUG Nexus, the open source engine (http://github.com/mstine/jug-nexus/tree/master) behind the new Memphis JUG website, I needed to put a good Textile engine in place. I really don’t care for writing actual HTML in a content management system, and JUG Nexus being a lightweight CMS, I wanted a lightweight markup [...]

So as I’m sitting here thumbing through my InfoQ feed on Google Reader, I come across the following posting: Software Craftsmanship Manifesto: A Call to Arms. It seems that a group of “programming patriots” has struck again (see the Manifesto for Agile Software Development - circa 2001), complete with a “founding document” look and feel. [...]

I’m currently working on a Grails application with a requirement for uploading product images, which are subsequently resized into thumbnails of various sizes for different shopping screens. Since it took a bit of doing to get this done, I thought I’d post my solution here in case anyone could benefit from it.
First, to set the [...]