Andrej Koelewijn

Groovy 1.6 makes it really easy to quickly try out new frameworks. Dependency management build into the language allows you to write simple scripts, all required libraries will be downloaded automatically when you run it. Here’s an example using Apache Camel. This script can simply be run from the command prompt. Groovy will compile it, [...]

Think you need flash to create a good looking scalable interactive chart on your webpage? Think again. Raphaël is a small javascript library that can be used to generate svg graphics, embedded in your html page. Here’s an example chart: Analytics. Pretty nice. The homepage has a number of impressive svg demos. Code examples can [...]

Here’s a presentation i did last year, but it seems appropriate to repost, as it makes the same statement as Diego Doval makes in his post what “web 2.0″ really means — and why “web 3.0″ will never come. I my presentation i made the same point that Diego is making: Web 2.0 apps are [...]

I wrote a small Python program today, to see if a could create a workaround for a problem i have in Java. I’ve written a couple of Java applications that use OpenOffice’s API to create ODF and MS-Word documents. The OpenOffice API that i used in Java is pretty horrible: very verbose, not intuitive. You [...]

I’m stuck with OpenOffice. I’m hoping somebody can help me with this. I’ve also posted the question to the OpenOffice.org forums and to StackOverflow, but so far no luck. I’m trying to replace a field in an openoffice document using the OpenOffice java api. I’m using the insertString method: The stacktrace is as follows: If [...]

One important aspect of open source is often overlooked: collaboration. Open source enables organizations to collaborate on building the software they need. Too often open source is just consumed: downloaded and installed because it’s free. To my surprise, the report i mentioned earlier, Ranking OS and OSS: NOIV monitor does reward organizations that release their [...]

A study by a dutch government agency (ICTU) was just released which discusses the current results of implementing open standards and open source by dutch government agencies: Verbinding in het vizier (dutch, pdf). What is interesting is that the results are not just discussed, but all agencies are ranked by their results to implement the [...]

In a response to Is the Relational Database Doomed, and my post REST is a distributed data model, Anders Nawroth wrote an interesting post, The future of RDBMS’s, which made me think about the role of databases. Anders makes the statement that RDBMSes aren’t very good at storing relationships. He points out that there are [...]

I’m sure some will not agree with my statement, and some will think, duh, that’s so obvious, but i think this needs to be said: REST is a distributed data model. REST is not a simplified way to implement Web Services. It’s also not a way to call Remote Procedures with a Javascript friendly syntax. [...]

Mainly as a reminder to myself, here’s how you target different environments with grails. Grails knows about three environments out of the box: development, test, production. When you create a war file you can specify the environment after the grails command: Sometimes, (actually quite often), you have more environments. For example a user acceptance testing [...]