The Kaptain on … stuff

Gradle provides several different ways to leverage your existing investment in Ant, both in terms of accumulated knowledge and the time you’ve already put into build files. This can greatly facilitate the process of porting Ant built projects over to Gradle, and can give you a path for incrementally doing so. The Gradle documentation does […]

Gradle, if you don’t already know it, is rapidly gaining traction as a strong leader in the next generation of build systems. It builds heavily upon excellent aspects of the Maven and Ant frameworks, yet is pitched as not suffering from the same “Frameworkitis“. And I’ve gotta say – the results are pretty spectacular. Among […]

One of the most compelling things about using Groovy is the fluent and concise syntax, as well as the productivity and readability gains that come out of it. But there’s no reason not to take advantage of some of the same techniques and some library support, in this case google-collections, to make Java code easy […]

I read an interesting article recently about using python and open source software to defeat a particular captcha implementation and I set out to see how hard it would be to do the same in Groovy. In particular, coming from the Java side of the fence, I was impressed by how the available libraries in […]

TestNG is a great tool for testing in Java, and it works even better with a little Groovy thrown in. Just lately I’ve had a lot of success using the DataProvider pattern. A DataProvider method in TestNG can return either a two dimensional Object array or an Iterator over each of the test parameters. A […]

I’ve been asked by my friend and co-worker Manfred Moser to give a presentation at next month’s Vancouver Island Java user’s group meeting, and silly me I said yes before remembering that speaking in front of people always makes me feel quesy and light-headed. Thanks Manfred for the kind invitation; I’ll do my best to […]