Saturday, September 20, 2008

A non-English BDD framework

I am a big fan of easyb, a BDD framework for Groovy and, of course you can use it to validate spec of your Java programs as it's running on JVM.

But what I really want to have is a support of my native, Thai, language. Recently found out that Groovy can compile UTF-8 code, and I have no problem to make it invoke some method with Thai characters. So, I have been porting the idea from easyb into my own, non-English BDD framework, TSpec.

Now you can tell a story of software specification in Thai, wanna learn it ?

Here's at Github.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Hangman in ZKGrails

Actually, it's not for your eyes, but Robert Lee has found my hangman source code via Pastbin. Then he posted it on DZone, but what he mentioned is not 100% correct. This hangman app is built on ZKGrails, which is a ZK plugin for Grails (not only Groovy - check the language tag there in the source code it's 'GroovyGrails', not 'Groovy').

Hangman is the first challenge among us, a group of PAW66 developer sites in Thailand.(rails66, grails66, django66, seam66 etc.) We set this program up to show the power of each Web framework we love. I have blogged about this hangman in Thai on Grails66.com, if you can read. That's why I said it's not intended for your eyes.

One more thing I'd like to mention is that I host this app with Morph AppSpace. It's really cool that not only you can host Rails apps, all kind of my Java apps including Grails and even ZK just work there. You did the great job, guys !

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Trust me, Grails will be a platform

Recently, SAP has released its Composition on Grails 1.0, the world first Grails distribution outside the project itself.
Yes, I said it is "the world first Grails distribution". This is really important to me as the release sent out a special signal that "Grails" will be "something" more that a normal web framework on JVM.

Thanks to Grails plugin architecture, you are able to get its core (thinking of it as a Linux kernel), put some plugins and scripts (think of them as programs around Linux), pack them together and that's it ! You got a web framework distribution that contains special features !

For example, imagine that you can have a Blog-ready Grails distro, a distro that contains some preset plugins, which help you create a blog like Wordpress in minutes. Or you can have a CMS-ready Grails distro, which enable you to 'grails create-cms' and you've got a Drupal-like system.

This will be a big step to take Grails into the next level ! Trust me, it's going to be a platform !