http://refactr.com/blog informs on and evangelizes best practices of using <a href="http://refactr.com/the-agile-manifesto/">agile methods</a> when designing and developing what are currently being called “Web 2.0” products and applications. Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:20:44 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We are always developing web applications for clients or for ourselves - and sometimes some sort of combination of the two as we are doing with SMBLive and the CloudProfile platform we have been working on much of the year. It has been great but the work has afforded us ... http://refactr.com/blog/2010/01/at-refactr-we-really-like-developing-products/ Ok, so we didn't stop signing non-disclosure agreements entirely, but what we have done is, postpone the signing of NDA's until after we have spoken with and know the folks with the idea. All too often these days it seems people are overly protective of their ideas and want to ... http://refactr.com/blog/2009/12/nobody-cares-about-your-secrets-or-why-we-stopped-signing-ndas/ We'd love to see some Groovy/Grails/Agile sessions at Minnesota's barcamp, MinneBar. Jesse, Scott, and I are a bit too harried at the moment to lead too many sessions so we are calling on the community to take the baton. We'd love to participate in discussions about agile development, web application ... http://refactr.com/blog/2009/11/call-for-session-organizers-for-minnebar-09/ I finally got around to upgrading our WordPress install tonight. It actually went very smoothly, but the amount of fear that I feel when upgrading should tell me something. Let us know if you experience any problems! http://refactr.com/blog/2009/10/refactr-com-now-200-less-hackable/ 2GX is only 5 weeks away: October 19th - 22nd in New Orleans. 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 ... http://refactr.com/blog/2009/09/2gx-early-bird-discount-still-available/ Too funny (and sad): If architects had to work like software developers 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 ... http://refactr.com/blog/2009/09/if-architects-had-to-work-like-software-developers/ So the big news in the Groovy/Grails arena is the pending purchase of SpringSource by VMware. I'm not really sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, you have to expect some pretty cool cloud tech to come out of an acquisition like this. I'm sure VMware is ... http://refactr.com/blog/2009/08/vmware-buying-springsource/ The changes in this release consist mainly of exposing the internals of each Circuit Breaker to developers, ops, or anyone that might care. 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 ... http://refactr.com/blog/2009/06/updates-to-circuit-breaker-grails-plugin/ I just released the CircuitBreaker Plugin for Grails. I recently read Michael Nygard's book Release It, which is based on his experiences from the trenches in tracking down the causes of large system failures. He relates a number of his experiences and then discusses the patterns and antipatterns that he's distilled ... http://refactr.com/blog/2009/06/circuitbreaker-pattern-in-grails/ Success! After playing around with a few things, I got AOP working in Grails this weekend and I've checked in the changes to my example app. I've also added a test that more clearly shows aop in action. I made a few changes inspired by Graeme's comment on my earlier post ... http://refactr.com/blog/2009/06/success-with-aop-in-grails-11/