thoughts.on.code

I put my InfoTec 2007 presentations online last night. If you don’t want to hear about how much fun I had giving them, here is the link.

My first talk was a 4 hour “Introduction to Ruby on Rails”. It had a decent turnout, and was a lot of fun to give. Thanks to a IM chat with Harish the night before the talk, I gave the best line I’ve given so far in a talk (IMHO): “So, what type of web application would you like to build today?”

My second talk was “Agile Java Web Frameworks”. There were twice as many people in this talk that had signed up before the conference started, though slightly fewer than in my rails talk. A slightly disjointed talk, I hit upon some of the more interesting web frameworks in the java world: Struts2, Spring MVC/WebFlow, Click, Rife, and then the dynamic contenders: Grails, Rails, and Lift.

Click was an interesting experience, as I had only learned about it the night before from Stephen Haberman. It looks pretty promising.

We only had enough time to quickly dive into one of the frameworks, and the audience chose Grails. So we delved into the bowels of GroovyQuiz and I showed them how it works.

Overall I had a lot of fun, and am looking forward to next years InfoTec.

The other day I needed to remove a mess of .svn directories from a project as I moved it from my personal box (using svn as the soure control) to the client’s source control system. This is a fairly frequent task, so attempting to be a “productive programmer” I decided that I would take the time to write a script to do this for me. After testing, it took about an hour to write… mainly because I tried to be too fancy, and tried a few things in Groovy I had not seen before. Overall, it was an hour well spent:

14 lines. I really like the eachDir and the eachFile methods on the File object… and there is even an eachFileRecurse. All I can say is: where the heck is the eachDirRecurse??? Oh well. It was still a good learning experience, and now I have a malleable tool next time I run into something similar.