Oliver’s Place

Due to the much better Visual Studio and Windows integration of Mercurial I’ve recently switched from Git to Mercurial for my .Net based projects. After setting up a Windows Server 2008 R2 instance on my VMWare vSphere Box I’ve switched from Hudson to TeamCity for Continuous Integration and I’m pretty satisfied with the outcome. I [...]

This article is the second one in my article series about fast loading web pages. The first article dealt with the Django Framework while this one is about Grails which I have recently elected as my preferred rapid web application framework. Ever since I switched from Django to Grails there was one issue that bothered [...]

Today I could once again not find a proper way to express a query needed for my current Grails project in either Hibernate HQL nor the DSL based variant of Hibernate’s Criteria API. While it is quite simple to run native SQL Queries in Grails Project using Spring’s NamedParameterJdbcTemplate I never had to actually Map [...]

Did you ever had to implement a menu in Grails GSP where every link element should be seperated from its predecessor by a separator character and where some of the elements can be missing when certain conditions are not met (security etc)? The part with the optional elements can turn the separator handling into a [...]

The other day I was writing a medium complex HQL query for a Grails App and no matter what the line executing the query would crash like this: ?View Code GROOVYjava.lang.NullPointerException at $Proxy13.createQuery(Unknown Source) at com.acme.PerformanceService.makePerformanceSheet(PerformanceService.groovy:38) … So how the hell do we figure out what the problem given so few information? Turns out that [...]

I’m a big fan of using memcached for improving the scalability of websites so when I recently fell in love with the Grails Framework I began to look for a way to configure the memcached client which blends in with the framework. Luckily Grails provides a very easy way to configure Spring Beans using a [...]

Recently I have abandoned my plans of switching to MacOSX as my primary Operating System after using the the OS for four months straight without touching Windows. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the ride – a lot! But I also had plenty of reasons for going back to Windows (7). First of all I [...]

Every Web Application Project I’ve been involved in the recent past had one thing in common: the client demanded more and more rich-client features at an ever increasing pace – without committing itself to real rich-client frameworks such as Flex or Silverlight. This leaves us with Javascript / AJAX for implementing highly dynamic User Interfaces [...]

I’ve been doing a serious amount of Grails Development lately and if there’s one Grails Plugin I consider mandatory for any serious production deployment then it is the UI-Performance plugin by Burt Beckwith. One of the features of the plugin that reduces server load is versioning and far-future “Expires” and “Cache-Control” headers for static resources. Each time [...]

This is one of the very rare occasions where Microsoft actually did something cool. A couple days ago I needed to test one of my web apps with Internet Explorer 8 and just for giggles with IE6 – although we’ve dropped support for that dinosaur a while ago. Remembering my previous experience with IE8 and [...]