Grails logo
Since June this year I started at work developing in the open source web application framework Grails . In the past I developed some websites in object oriented PHP in combination with templates in Smarty. Gained experience in handling quite common things like forms/JS, uploads, usermanagement, simple fancy stuff, user friendly URL’s via mod_rewrite et cetera. Actually in my last project (WTC) everything was very nice and clean, no more than 50 lines of code for handling a page, everything beneath was done by OO-classes interfacing with the database. But still it was not a real framework and I have never used one in PHP, although there are plenty of PHP frameworks out there. I think my expertise was more on the building of stand-alone applications with Java Swing/AWT.
But, everything has changed for now. I started building a new prototype of the data support platform for my work in Grails, which is a concatenation of Groovy on Rails. Groovy being a superset of Java – 100% compatible with normal Java, so easily integrate existing libraries – allowed me to pick up things quite fast. Furthermore what I mentioned about my personal PHP experience in the above paragraph, is already covered completely by the Grails framework. Everything works nicely via the Model-View-Controller concept. Beneath the hood Hibernate and Spring are doing their work for persistency/database stuff. The only thing you have to do is write your domain classes which describe your database tables, constraints, fields and relations. Then with a single command you can generate the whole application with CRUD-interface, which means the controllers and views for your domains are generated. To start your webapplication you only have to type ‘grails run-app’ and that’s it. One final thing to mention is that there are many plugins available to give your application a lot of nice features and that Netbeans has a plugin to support Grails.
Of course most effort is then going into customizing your views and controllers and testing. But I am quite convinced that for the upcoming time Grails has become my favorite webdevelopment environment. I am currently even busy to port all existing WTC code to Grails and within a short time it was already up and running. I’d recommend anyone to give it a look/try.
Music note
For quite a while there is musical software out there which helps you in generating music – no I am not talking about software like Reason or oldskool software like ScreamTracker or FastTracker. The software I am talking about works by displaying a matrix of blocks which you can press independently of each other. The whole matrix of blocks is usually being traversed horizontally from left to right by an imaginary reader. By pressing a block a tone is being generated when the reader passes the block. By combining multiple pressed blocks you can make spacy music.
I have seen several of these programs on the internet already and today I found another very simple and tiny online music generator, but this one has a nice 3D presentation. Go and try it yourself here.
Switzerland
The last two weeks Nina and I were on holiday to Switzerland. We jumped on the train at Utrecht Centraal to Basel and from there on we took several other trains to visit places and locations. We started our holiday in Luzern, which – to our impression – was the most attractive city.
The overall weather was quite good, except for one hot day in Lugano where it was too warm to walk around, so we where sitting at and in the swimming pool the whole day. Now I understand those sun-adorers who take a hotel at the beach and do nothing the whole day. The day after Lugano we went to St. Moritz where the weather became the complete opposite. It was snowing and almost freezing, so we had to buy extra clothes. Even the people in the village themselves didn’t expect this snow/weather.
The final destination was Zermatt with its Matterhorn mountain nearby with a height of 4478 meters. The transport in Zermatt is mostly electric, so it is a quiet village and very clean. The village is even in the top five of greenest cities in the world.
We have seen a lot of beautiful landscapes on our trip and nice villages with old buildings. You can see the pictures we took at the travel gallery under the Switzerland flag.
NIN - concert hall
Yesterday I went for the third time in my life to a concert of Nine Inch Nails, previously I saw them in Paradiso and at the Nijmegen Rockin’ Park music festival. This time I went together with a good friend(+girlfriend) and for the second time in my life I was sitting at a concert (in the back). Far away from the sage, but actually not so bad, it was quite warm inside and I usually get tired in my legs when standing the whole evening.
I mostly liked the older tracks they performed. Some tracks I didn’t even recognize, but afterwards I read that he mixed up some tracks live. I don’t know about the ambiance. I had the idea that they were just performing with not that much interaction with the public, but Trent isn’t a big talker at all. But that doesn’t really matter, in the end it is all about the music. Another thing I missed is the big LED-screens with animations on it. I was expecting to see that at this show, but they actually only used oldskool light spots mostly. It certainly would have brought the performance to a higher level.
But I keep respect for the band and their philosophy in the music world. The last albums are available for free, concert footage is allowed to be used/mixed and Trent just posted his view on how to do it different in the music world. Probably the tours they are doing this summer are the last ones and will they be non-active for a long while.
