I am a Java Champion and the author of the books “Mockito Made Clear” and “Help Your Boss Help You”, (Pragmatic Bookshelf), “Kotlin Cookbook”, (O’Reilly Media), “Modern Java Recipes” (O’Reilly Media), “Gradle Recipes for Android” (O’Reilly Media), and “Making Java Groovy” (Manning), as well as over a dozen video courses at Safari Books Online. I’m a regular member of the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference tour and have given talks all over the world. Through my company, Kousen IT, Inc, I’ve taught training courses to and worked with thousands of developers.
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Making Swing Groovy, Part I
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to understand how much Groovy improves Swing user interfaces. Like so many Java developers, I rarely write client-side programs. Almost all of my time and effort with Java over at least the last five years has been on the server side, mostly with frameworks like Struts,…
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Minor bug in Grails selenium plugin
There is a minor bug in the selenium plugin for Grails. It has been discussed on the mailing list, but I thought I would also document it here. I’m using Grails 1.0.3 with version 0.4 of the selenium plugin, which wraps selenium core version 0.8.3. If you install the plugin and try to run the…
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Star rating in the Grails RichUI plugin
I’ve been working on a Grails application for rating the popularity of Grails plugins. Rather than just use a simple form with radio buttons or a drop-down list, I thought I’d use the star rating component of the RichUI plugin. The initial set-up is easy enough. First, install the RichUI plugin. grails install-plugin richui then…
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Podcast on Pulse in education and training
A couple of weeks ago I participated in a BriefingsDirect podcast about using Pulse in academic and training environments. For those who aren’t aware, Pulse is a product created by Genuitec (the same people who make the MyEclipse IDE) that allows you to manage Eclipse profiles and plugins. I’ve used MyEclipse in my academic courses…
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Getting a list of Grails plugins programmatically
In September, I’m very happy to be giving a couple of presentations at the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference in the Boston area. One of my presentations is a review of the various available Grails plugins. To prepare for that, I thought I’d create a Grails application that acted as a survey, so people could…
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NetBeans 6.1 is a lot better than I thought
This week I’m in New Haven, CT, teaching a class that combines UML and Java Web Services (an odd combination to be sure). The client wanted to use NetBeans as their primary IDE, and I always try to accommodate that if I can. My last exposure to NetBeans was back in version 5.5, I think,…
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Our last, best hope … for message digests?
So I’m teaching my course in Securing Java Web Applications (my third one in the last six weeks) and we got to a section that discussed the MD5 algorithm for generating message digests. One of the students asked, “whatever happened to MD’s 1 through 4?” I simply couldn’t resist saying, “MD’s 1, 2, and 3…
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Never miss a ballgame
As Tim Kurkjian famously said, “Never miss the opportunity to go to a baseball game. You might see something you’ve never seen before.” This week I’m in Asheville, NC. I’m very busy with my Securing Java Web Applications class while other issues keep coming up, but the bottom line is that the Asheville Tourists (the…
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Minor league baseball rocks
I’ve been traveling a lot lately. Fortunately, this is baseball season, so sometimes I get a chance to visit a park I’ve never been to before. Last week I was in Allentown, PA. Actually, that’s not quite true — I was actually in Schnecksville, PA, a small suburb of Allentown. It turns out that this…
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Eight years and haven’t missed a day yet
On May 31, 2000, I officially left my job at United Technologies and became a full-time technical trainer. It’s now been eight years since that day. While I don’t like to talk about personal things here very often, I thought that was worth a mention. That, and the fact that in all the training classes…