Mixed XML and Property Files?

Have you ever wanted the simplicity of a plain old Java properties file but with just a little bit of grouping provided by XML? I’ve been working on a small side-project recently and it requires a simple configuration file of a dozen items or so. The project needed a repeatable set of configuration parameters, so that it could connect to several SVN servers. Each connection needed a URL, username, password, and a few other ancillary properties. Read more →

Maven vs Grails

We have a Grails 1.1 which uses ant + Ivy as its build mechanism. The Ivy configuration has always been wonky, I wasn’t the person who set it up so I’m not exactly sure why it is that way. You would have to run this special ant target, “copy-jars”, which movies the libraries downloaded with Ivy around because some grails command would delete them. When it came time to upgrade to the latest version, Grails 1. Read more →

Grails HTTP-based Test Plugins

There are two leading frameworks for doing http-based integration tests within the Grails framework: functional-test and webtest. Both are packaged as grails plugins and accomplish the same task in a similar manner. The main library behind the scene is HtmlUnit. This is a well thought out library for abstracting web conversations, i.e get this url, check that it has a form, click the submit button. It’s basically a headless browser which even supports Javascript. Read more →