November 3, 2008, 09:09:36
Like other bloggers with an ego, I have Google Alerts set up to let me know when someone mentions me or my blog anywhere that Google knows about. I got an alert yesterday letting me know that I’d been mentioned on the latest episode of the Grails Podcast. How cool is that? Specifically, they mentioned my Groovy Sql Closure Examples post. Thanks, Glen and Sven, for the podcast love. 
I’ve been spending some time with Grails latest and have been really impressed with it. I spent a couple of hours on Saturday playing with it, seeing how much of my Rails knowledge was applicable to Grails. Quite a bit of it, actually. I really like what I’ve seen of Grails, so far. I’d probably have to use it on a real project to really get a feel for it, but it looks like it would be a nice environment to work in.
September 7, 2008, 18:18:47
I first started doing Java back in 1995. That’s quite a long time ago. Once I got going, I wrote Java code every single day, for thirteen years. I co-authored a Java book, gave talks on Java and was an all-around, Java Guy™. And sometime around 2006, I got bored with it. Completely and totally bored. I was a one-man shop at a small company, my code was running just-fine-thanks-very-much, and I didn’t feel like doing anything new with it, at all. I was more interested in Ruby and, to a lesser degree, Rails, so Java changes didn’t really interest me. And thus, I failed to notice some really cool stuff that was going on in Java-land.
In June of this year I joined a new company that is doing some rather advanced Java work. I had to get current, tout de suite, and in so doing, I’ve really gotten interested and engaged again. Spring and Hibernate have really changed from the older versions I was using, and so has JUnit. All for the better, from what I can tell.
And with this renewed interest, I’ve bought my first new Java books in over 3 years. I bought Effective Java (2nd Edition) to replace my first edition and Java Concurrency in Practice, because I heard good things about it. So far, I’ve read about 2/3 of Effective Java. I used to buy Java books all the time. I have tons of them. But when I got bored, I stopped shelling out the cash on the Java books.
Java-land is still a very nice place to play. Sometimes you have to get an outside perspective to realize that.
