Back to the Grails Comp

I've recently been on holidays and contrary to what I had planned I have not touched any coding in the last week or so. So today it was time to get back on the coding horse. I'm planning to spend around an hour each day working on the grails comp project (without checking email, twitter or anything else).

So today was the day to take stock and see where the project is at. Firstly I had previously had a working version0.1 and decided to merge that back to Master and then to work out of master. One of the problems I have is that I seem to have quite a few branches that I've experimented with so will need to check each of them and take the good bits.

I spent some time ginning around with git and Netbeans this morning and had hoped to avoid this time wastage but am currently thinking that it will be good to use Netbeans power to assist with debugging down the track. I need to spend more time organising my versioning before diving into the next big issue.

Following this, the next thing will be to work out how to have custom prize objects instead of using strings to describe a prize. Initially this seemed quite simple however its the creation of a new competition that requires a new prize at the same time that makes things tricky. This would seem to be a fairly common problem with any web app ie creating a new object that contains a new object of another type so it will be great to get this problem solved. If you're interested download the code and/or follow along here at Github

Comp 0.1

I've finally got enough of the comp project completed to make a dodgy initial release. I feel I've made enormous progress over the holiday period and the following functionality is in place:

• users can add an entry to a competition
• admin can create a competition
• admin can generate random winners
• winners are generated for each prize that the competition has

There are still many things to do but this version contains all the basic functions. So far the learning experience has been huge. I've read heaps of articles and a couple of grails books but it wasn't until I actually applied the knowledge that I really started to learn.

In addition to grails/groovy, the other big win for me out of the project so far has been Git. I can't speak highly enough of it and the cool way branches can be created for very little storage cost. I have been creating new branches willy nilly to experiment with different strategies. If things don't work out, I have been able to easily revert to any other version. The low cost comes because Git creates a hash of each file and then references those hashes instead of duplicating files in each new branch. Brilliant really!

Also in other news, I've just been using a plain old text editor (well the quite awesome Textmate) instead of Netbeans so far. Don't get me wrong I like Netbeans but Grails is so simple that I don't really need the Netbeans power at this stage. There is only a beta git plug in for Netbeans too, so in reality even if using Netbeans I would still have been 'gitting' from the command line.

Have a happy and safe New Year everyone, more dev news next year.

Competition Progress

After the always pleasing initial progress you make with a Grails project, I thought I'd try branching and setting up my tests. This process was simple using Git however I seem to have made a few mistakes and resorted to my old habits of deleting everything and starting again. This is a n00b's action for sure. After going over old ground I realised that I hadn't needed to start again from scratch. 

Git to the rescue... and now I'm back with my previously half completed project. I think now I will be more judicious with branching and less inclined for scorched earth. 

As far as the project itself, the domain classes have been created and I basically have a site that will let you create a competition, create an entry, generate a winner. My next step is to CRUD prizes. More to follow... we'll after Christmas anyway... Merry Christmas (especially to you Pablo my only confirmed reader)

Git

I have been tinkering with a grails app for fun and was just going to run it on my local box. I decided to show it to a mate and had to cart it into work for a show and tell. It was suggested that I upload the code to GitHub, an online code repo. At first I thought this would be yet another time consuming exercise but it was really simple. To get going all I had to do was create an account, download git (there is an easy OS X installer) and that was pretty much it.
I didn't bother reading the full instructions but it was all really intuitive. Safe to say its all now online and very happy. If you got collaborative code check out GitHub, its awesome. Also if you want a quick and dirty (that's figurative) screencast check Jeff Brown's also excellent screencast.

Finally if you want to have a play on my grails app, feel free to check it out.

Btw the grails app is a competition registration app. Basically its to allow people to sign up to an online competition to win stuff. There's no other activity except registering to win. It has been a good exercise and I was inspired to develop this after listening to those crazy dudes at Grails Podcast who are running this type of competition. I choose to develop in Grails over Java as I want to push my development in that area. (I considered Django but I really like the cross compatibility between Grails and Java [no flame wars I know Groovy is Java]. Besides it would seem wrong to develop a Python web app for the Grails Podcast!).
The app is open source so can be played with by anyone and I welcome any thoughts.

Perfect code

This morning I wrote perfect code. It was elegant, extensible and dependency injected. I was so proud. How happy was I? It was time for a happy dance and a celebratory caramel latte.

However it didn't do what the client wanted. I can't describe my disappointment when I discovered that my 'perfect' solution was not the answer. Instead a one line code changed was used to get the job done.

I smiled on the outside but inside there were tears.

As Bruce Lee said "it's like a finger pointing at the moon, don't focus on the finger or you'll miss all that heavenly glory". A valuable less on indeed.

Victory!

After the ongoing grief with Eclipse and Subversion I have finally been able to update the goodtimes project. I used a very cool Subversion GUI called Versions and it worked beautifully. I guess I'm not hardcore as I didn't use command line.

Anyway the news now is that if anyone is interested you can check out the source build it, play with it, add to it and most importantly leave me feeback.

What a day...

I have begun refactoring GoodTimes and so far its working well with MigLayout. The biggest problem has been that subversion seems to be drastically out of sync so I am still yet to get the new code into the repo. I'm sure that I'll get past it soon (even if I have to do something drastic).

Its side issues like this that gets frustrating initially but ultimately will be satisfying once its fixed.