Screenshots

Release Notes:

• Added filtering, sorting and pagination options to lists of ideas and projects.
• Added ability to save sorting, filtering, and pagination preferences.
• Archive views for projects and ideas were added.
• Added the ability delete groups, projects, and ideas (in addition to archiving them).
• Simplified the account management section where groups, projects and people are managed.
• Improved idea search functionality and added it to all pages.
• Descriptions and comments now retain carriage returns.
• Increased character limits in a number of places.
• Fixed some issues surrounding importing and exporting projects.
• Numerous formatting and style tweaks.
• Added the ability to change plans and pay us actual money. :)
• Killed over 100 bugs (and most assuredly added a few new secret ones).

We’re excited about the prospects this app holds for organizations looking to get their ideas “under control”. Hopefully we can roll out some other great features soon. On the docket are:

• Public community site
• Public idea list and voting widget
• Facebook widgets
• API hooks into some complimentary products
• Our own API to allow others to riff on our work
• Adding project packs that can be purchased without upgrading to next plan level

For one, Scott, Jesse, and I spent a month working/playing in Mexico with our families. We rented a house right on the beach and it was a blast. Some days it was hard to get into doing work but we were able to participate in daily scrum calls and work more or less by our own schedules.

Ben, Scott, & Jesse at Chichen Itza, Mexico

So we were in Mexico, we’ve been back for a couple months, what’s all this work we’ve been doing? Here’s a rundown:

We engaged with SMBLive last year to create CloudProfile. Along the way, SMBLive and thus, CloudProfile was purchased by ReachLocal. Jesse, Scott and I are a big part of their team and are helping to grow the Reach Local Digital Presence team here in Minneapolis. If you are an experienced Java/Grails or mobile (iPhone/Android) developer you should really hit us up for details.

Luke Francl and I just wrapped the latest MinneBar (un) conference held at the Best Buy corporate campus on May 22nd. We had nearly 1000 participants sign up and more than 600 came through the doors. At the event we announced the results of the first MinneSpark grant competition where 3 winners were awarded $2000 cash and nearly $4000 in services for their compelling ideas.

We continue the work on our two products under development. The idea management application, , is set to come out of beta next month with a few enhancements, with a bigger update this fall.

And then there is . We have a very significant update coming very soon as we roll our agile project tracking application out of “beta” as well. With a complete overhaul to the interface and dozens of improvements we are excited to see what people think. We still like using it more than any other tool we’ve seen out there.

And last but not least, Refactr has hired two new software engineers: Spencer Hartberg and Steve Vlaminck. If that last one sounds familiar, well, you’ll know why when you see him. We’ll have more formal introductions in subsequent posts. We still may have additional opportunities for an up and coming mobile developer and designer with client-side development chops.

So when Jesse asked if I was planning to bring the Wii into the office during the traditionally slow time week between Christmas and New Year’s I didn’t even pause before I said, “If I can get free to play Wii I would rather use that time to work on Lean-to or MileMarker” an innovation management app debuting today. And it was true we love building web apps and we hope that love comes through in the interactions, features, and concepts of our products.

Over the next few weeks we’re going to highlight some of the features of MileMarker and the improvements being made to Lean-to. Maybe we’ll even be able to throw in some of the exciting news on the CloudProfile front such as a partnership with a Minnesota-based electronics retailer.

Chances are, y/our idea isn’t even very good. Techcrunch had a post on Saturday about startups being afraid to tell “their secrets”. And it’s true. Most of the time the ideas aren’t good, or certainly are not unique. And startups and entrepreneurs are actually doing themselves a disservice by holding their product ideas close to the vest. They lose out on the important process of vetting their ideas to collegues and friends to determine how much merit it has; and on the feedback and critique that coud make the idea better. But most of the time, the folks who are so guarded of their ideas simply don’t act on them, so a product never emerges.

So, don’t be offended if we say we want to wait to sign your NDA. Come talk to us anyway. If we end up working together we’ll get all the contracts and legal stuff taken care of, but in the meantime you can be sure we’ll be open and honest with you about your idea, and its merits, feasibility, and you’ll likely come out of our discussion with an even better concept.

Please take a look at the existing sessions and sign up to lead a discussion. We’ll even help if you like.

Let us know if you experience any problems!

There’s a great speaker line-up with some great sessions … oh, and I’ll be speaking too.

The Groovy Users of Minnesota are represented well at this conference: Hamlet D’Arcy has four sessions, Robert Fischer (GUM alum) has two sessions, and I have two sessions. We’re pulling in 3 of 19 speakers for 8 of the 50 Groovy/Grails presentations. If you’re planning to be there, let me know. I’d love to meet in person and grab a beer.

If you haven’t already registered, the early bird discount ends this Friday, September 18th, so get to it. And, you can use the promo code SPRINGONE2GX75 for an additional $75 off! You can register here.

SpringOne & 2GX are running concurrently, so there are eight tracks and over 100 sessions to choose from. A little something for everyone.

I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Via: Big Contrarian

At Tuesday night’s GUM meeting, I presented my experiences with AOP in Grails and we discussed the Circuit Breaker Plugin for most of the meeting. As part of that discussion, I talked about things that I would like to add to the plugin in the near future.

The main thing on my list was to expose the information about each Circuit Breaker via JMX. To make this happen, I first submitted a patch for the JMX Grails Plugin to allow any Spring bean to be exposed, rather than just Grails Services. Many thanks to Ken Sipe for committing my patch and releasing a new version of the plugin the same evening I submitted the patch!

All you have to do is install the JMX plugin and you can now view the current state of each Circuit Breaker via the JMX Console. In addition to viewing the current breaker state, failure threshold, current failure count, and open-state timeout, you can also manually trip or reset the breaker.

As part of the discussion around JMX on Tuesday, Brian mentioned that often he would prefer to use something quicker and more lightweight than JMX to get a snapshot of the current application state. Whether for easy scripting purposes or just to provide developers with easier access to the data, he thought a simple controller would be more beneficial than JMX integration. That’s now in the plugin as well.

Run grails install-circuit-breaker-controller after the plugin is installed to add CircuitBreakerController.groovy to your project. The controller displays the current state of each Circuit Breaker that has been configured in the application.

Hopefully more updates will come in the not-too-distant future, but before I get too deep I want to make sure I know what would be useful to add. Until I use it more, or get feedback from others, it’s hard to say what would actually add value (and not just clutter). My short list of next potential updates are:

• Additional metrics to expose via JMX and the Controller
  • e.g. number of requests, average response time, number of good responses, number of errors, current number of concurrent requests, concurrent request high-water mark, etc
• Allow configuration of timeout & failureThreshold by exception type. From Release It!:
  

  For example, you may choose to have a lower threshold for “timeout calling remote system” failures than “connection refused” errors.

In addition to my own usage, I definitely appreciate any feedback that you might have if you have a need to use the plugin.