Oliver’s Place

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I admit it – I’m a performance junkie. I can’t stand code that just works but performs poorly. Being said, I recently fell in love with Django (a fantastic Python powered web application framework). In one of my current projects – xarmory.com – the number of requests for static resources issued during page load began [...]

Inspired by this article I decided to find out if the same technique can be exploited in my current project which is developed in django. My first problem was to come up with a viable cache key scheme since simply using the full request URI as suggested in the article wouldn’t work for me because [...]

About a year ago I’ve switched over to IntelliJ as my primary Java IDE. When I began to dabble a bit in Django a few days ago, I realized that IntelliJ had me spoiled when it comes to Editor Features – especially when working with Javascript and HTML files. Notepad++ – although a great text [...]