Looking at Scala (and then play)

Decided to have a look at Scala, after reading about the inventor of Groovy's high praise of it.

Found a decent quick tutorial
http://www.scala-lang.org/docu/files/ScalaTutorial.pdf

From there I want to move on to the play framework

Grails Documentation

I find the best grails documentation is always

http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/introduction.html

And you can look at specific version just by dropping in the version number instead of 'latest'

For instance for Grails 2.0.4

http://grails.org/doc/2.0.4/guide/introduction.html

Looking at Ruby

Having become a bit disheartened at the lack of Grails/Groovy jobs in my area, I decide to have a little look at Ruby.
So far it is pretty depressing, the tutorials generally do not work or are horribly outdated.

One that did seem to work so far was:

http://andreapavoni.com/blog/2013/8/a-rails-4-tutorial-application-for-beginners

Obviously I can see the similarities between Grails & Rails. But I have to say thus far I am unimpressed by Rails. It seems far clumsier, with rake, db:migrates, bundles, etc. Even the console is horrible inferior.
Of course this is just my opinion after 2 hours.

Grails just feels more elegant and for sure was easier to get started. I really like the Grails GORM, as opposed to the Rails db script creation and then creating the classes manually. A relationship between two objects in the database is one line in Grails.

The main stumbling blocks I had with Grails in the early days was plugins, which I feel has been largely addressed now.
Ruby uses Gems which seem quite similar in nature to plugins.

Get rid of skype ads

I cannot stand being advertised to.
This is an easy fix for getting rid of all ads in Skype (6.11)
Just edit your hosts file to add the following two lines

     127.0.0.1 ad-emea.doubleclick.net
     127.0.0.1 rad.msn.com

Works a treat.

Log4j Default Settings

In Grails I find this the best log4j settings to use in my Config.groovy

log4j = {
    debug 'grails.app' 

    appenders {
      console name:'stdout', follow:true, layout:pattern(conversionPattern: '%d{HH:mm:ss} | [%-5p] | %c{2} | %m%n')
      //rollingFile name:'mylog', file:'logs/eComm.log', maxFileSize:'10000KB',  maxBackupIndex:10, layout:pattern(conversionPattern: '%d{dd-MMM-yyyy HH:mm:ss} | [%-5p] | %c{2} | %m%n') 
    }


    error  'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.servlet',  //  controllers
         'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.pages', //  GSP
         'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.sitemesh', //  layouts
         'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.mapping.filter', // URL mapping
         'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.mapping', // URL mapping
         'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.commons', // core / classloading
         'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins', // plugins
         'org.codehaus.groovy.grails.orm.hibernate', // hibernate integration
         'org.springframework',
         'org.hibernate',
         'grails.app.services.org.grails.plugin.resource',
         'grails.app.taglib.org.grails.plugin.resource',
         'grails.app.resourceMappers.org.grails.plugin.resource',
         'net.sf.ehcache.hibernate'

    warn   'org.mortbay.log'     
}

Parallel.js

This looks some interesting tech, I should investigate more

Parallel.js

Technology Lead

Since taking on a new role as a technology lead in the digital marketing space I have had less and less to do with Grails and Groovy directly.
So I am going to branch out a bit on this blog to include all technology.