gradually groovy

This week I’ve been mostly reading Programming Groovy – Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer by Venkat Subramaniam. This is one of those few books where you don’t skim or skip forward, where the author(s) keeps you engaged end to end.  The subject could also be a contributing factor; Groovy is quite something. There are a number of “wow” moments as you go through the book, seeing practical ways you might truly enhance your productivity.

I’m a firm believer in ‘convention over configuration‘. Groovy takes all the ceremony, repeated by each and every Java programmer every time, and does it for you. Leaving you to get on with lines of code that concentrate on delivering business value.

As I say there are many “wow” moments learning Groovy, however there’s one that stands out to me as a Product Owner, namely the ease of integration. What this means to me is a team could choose to move gradually to Groovy. The project unit tests could be used to provide the security to refactor Java functionality over to Groovy bit by bit. A steady progression rather than a big re-write. The Java and the Groovy living side by side over a period of time. I think Groovy stands out from the other similar languages, in this regard.

(Thanks Darran for pointing me in the Groovy direction)

Next stop Grails.

why so little noise for wine on mac osx

It’s a strange thing to me that there’s not a lot more noise on the web about Wine on Mac OS X. The Darwine project seems to me to have dust and cobwebs on it. If there is work going on getting Wine packaged and supported on Mac as it is on Linux, it’s not very transparent to a keen user like myself.

I found just one such “project” here, however that too looks quiet, plus it looks like one individual who has put the work in rather than a community of collaborators. The word on the web seems to be DIY.

There is of course the Cross-Over crew, however, this is not FOSS. And more importantly, while very very good, that platform mostly caters for “main stream” MS based apps.

The motivation to get Wine working on Mac can often be quite specific, perhaps because of a very proprietary piece of software. That is certainly, my case where I have everything I need on the Mac, for example a full office suite. Everything, that is, bar just one thing. I was very pleased to hear one more enthusiastic individual has taken it upon himself to create a bespoke package, this time specifically for that one application.

However, I’m still puzzled as to why there’s no community of Mac users as there is for Linux. Sure there’s the dual boot option, but that requires a Windows license which comes with a temptation to be a pirate. Or there’s dual booting to Linux, but that’s tricky or at least a bit of an overkill, when all you need is one app running on your macbook.

Perhaps there’s so little interest because the number of important proprietary applications are now few and on the decline. More and more apps are either cross-platform or fully web-based these days. Being platform dependant may become even more important as devices like the iPhone and netbooks are favoured over the PC. Also with the cost of producing and distributing installation media increasing, no doubt will promote web-based applications. The Google pack of tools is a good example of this trend, as is one of my favourites, the Remember The Milk task list.

So perhaps Darwine is unlikely to get any traction. And on that basis there’s a possibility Wine itself may become obsolete.

this week i will be mostly reading books by Mike Cohn

I’ve recently purchased two books by Mike Cohn on the Agile methodology. The two were packaged together in one of those amazon deals – “User Stories Applied” & “Agile Estimating and Planning“.

I’m about 60 pages into the latter and have to say this is one of the most applicable books I’ve read! That’s an odd thing, because as yet I haven’t really applied any Agile practices; but this book inspires me to do so.