The Kaptain on … stuff

• Spending Sunday doing taxes. Hopefully the refund makes of worthwhile. 😉 #
• @cfieber you boys have a good trip! in reply to cfieber #
• @mosabua No mercy for you sir! Spent a good part of the day chasing dependency problems myself in reply to mosabua #

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I work for a company that develops bioinformatics solutions, so when I came across BioLinux I just had to check it out. An Ubuntu 8.0.4 distro loaded with more than 500 tools for analysis, including sample data and comprehensive documentation to get you started.
There was an available virtual machine image at the bagvapp virtual appliance repository, thank you very much, so I installed in VMWare and was off to the races. Alternatively you can download an install image, order a live CD or install on a memory stick.

I saw a lot of familiar software, things like the CLC Workbench and BioJava and a multitude of single purpose apps to facilitate research and analaysis for proteomics, genomics and other disciplines.  The majority of the applications have been built and accumulated over the course of years, mostly on linux and all either open source or just plain free.  They’re pretty rough around the edges – not a lot of flashy GUI’s here, mostly command line interfaces and simple single window apps. Reminds me of why there’s a need for software like I write – to provide a workbench for managing the multitude of different activities scientists do on a day to day basis, and to help organize the giga-bytes of experimental data that gets created along the way.

This particular distro was pretty impressive, had everything installed that I would expect(and a bunch of things that I had no clue about – no biology PhD here I’m afraid). And fresh – all of the installed software was up to date, which I have yet to see on a downloaded VM image.

A big thank you to NEBC for putting out this well thought out – and visually beautiful – distribution, and to VMWare for making virtualization such a piece of cake.

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Today was a pretty great day, I must say.

I got a chance to work with the brand new Griffon framework and must say – the combination of clear MVC architecture, Grails style convention over configuration and already powerful plugin selection make it pretty sexy.

The early support for cobertura code coverage and fest GUI testing are both appealing to any developer that appreciates the need for testing your application.  I’m still undecided on the Grails-like adoption of storing project information in a “.griffon” folder in the user directory and completely outside of the actual project directory structure. With luck, future versions will allow for incorporating maven to handle dependency management and get me past my FUD on that one, something that the latest Grails supports. I haven’t yet tried that new feature out in Grails out so I’m not entirely sure how well it works, but the docs say that there is a provided archetype and that all of the familiar Grails targets are mirrored in the maven goals.

Being able to add additional Groovy style builders as plugins is about as transparent as it gets – install the plugin and you can immediately incorporate that builder anywhere in the application.  The only builder component set that I have had a chance to work with previously is SwingX, but anyone who’s had the opportunity to use a JXTable in place of the vanilla JTable can immediately see the advantage! And the JDirectoryChooser from l2fprod is a powerful alternative to the Swing built-in JFileChooser.

The crown jewel so far however seems to be  the wizard plugin. This addresses what is  a very common scenario in any process related application:

• collect User input in a series of steps
• validate the input at each step
• allow the User  to go back and review or change any inputs
• apply all of the input to an underlying business process
• provide feedback as to the result

The wizard framework worked pretty much as advertised right out of the box and, although the project seems to have stalled (couldn’t seem to  find any updates since mid-2008) , when integrated so well with Griffon it seems a very good candidate for building lightweight applications – installers in particular jump to mind.

Any way you look at it – for a project as newly arrived as Griffon, it’s already promising to be a very powerful enabler. Thanks to Andres Almiray and everyone else involved in the project. I look forward to using Griffon more in the future.

So thanks to the free WordPress app, I can even blog from my iPhone. Now, if only it had a landscape mode keyboard so my fat little fingers stood a chance.

Whoops, spoke too soon – looks like they’re testing the new version, complete with landscape mode, as we speak. I look forward to seeing it on the app store soon.

The Groovy and Grails scene has been busy lately, with new versions of both dropping within the last few weeks.  Seems like the perfect time to get familiar with both, so I’ve started building a new Grails application.

I play cards with a bunch of friends fairly regularly and it would be nice to track the wins/losses online where everyone can watch and comment (smack talk welcomed).  We generally play a variation of canasta with 4 to 6 players.
There’s a fairly simple scoring system involved so all we really need to track is a Player and a Position for each game. Slightly complicating the domain is that, depending on the number of players, games are either played with a partner or solo.

Goals and Means

• secure access: using the Stark security plugin
• taggability: easy tagging of Games using the Taggable plugin
• searchability: full text searching courtesy of  compass, lucene and the Searchable plugin
• richUI: incorporating GUI widgets with GrailsUI – to make everything pretty don’t you know.
• mobile compatability: after all, what use is there in owning an iPhone if you don’t program apps you can use it with? For this the iUI plugin to provide parallel access to views from a mobile phone
• dynamic application settings: using the Settings plugin to enable dynamic configuration of system properties in an unobtrusive fashion
• test data availability: using the Fixtures plugin to keep cruft out of Bootstrap.groovy and to support easy testing

So far…

Installing the latest Grails, creating a new project using IntelliJ and installing the plugins I wanted took all of about 15 minutes! Having configured similar features in regular Java apps many times, I look back and wish I was using Grails at the time.  The ease of installation and configuration is really pretty astounding. The ability to make a domain class lucene searchable is a one liner. Similary, making things taggable is just implementing an interface. Sigh… if only everything was that easy.

Next steps

• domain model for Game and related entities
• prettify the views

I was reading this blog post today and it occurred to me – my present employer has done all of this, and more, for its developers.

1. For my daily work I use a Macbook Pro with 3GB of memory and a 7200 rpm drive. It was the absolute top of the line when it was purchased two years ago.

2. On my desk there’s a second flat screen LCD on a swivel arm and a laptop stand to promote good workplace ergonomics.

3. My employer brought in a room designer and consulted the company regarding the cubicle setup, including the wall height.

4. Whiteboards are available in each cubicle and in each meeting room.

5. Everyone can and does listen to music and most of us make our iTunes libraries available for sharing over the network, ensuring an ample supply of tunes.

6. This is truly funny, because we have THIS EXACT PHONE!

7. Wifi everywhere, and VPN access to work from outside the office to boot.

8. I cannot actually think of the last time I needed a stapler, but I’m sure I could have one if I asked.

I knew I worked for a great company, but this just serves to reaffirm that I must be working in the right place. Thanks for the article Dave. You made my day!