IBM buying Sun?

Some news sites (1, 2) today are reporting that IBM is in talks to buy Sun in a deal for at least $6.5 billion.

Off course this is some interesting news and might have some impact on Java and Java related products from Sun (GlassFish, NetBeans, ...). The future will tell us.

The reason I'm blogging about this that I'm believing for years that Oracle's Larry Ellison would step up one day and buy Sun. It would make a lot of sense in my opionion. Oracle is really attached to Java and they are involved in many JSR's. With buying Sun and thus Java they would have real strong voice in which Java would be heading. They would also have their own operating system which is one the less things they don't have at the moment. You can then have a stack like Oracle Solaris, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Application Server and Oracle Applications. And there is a lot more, think about MySQL!

For once and all I want to write down this prediction, so if it would happen once (and this seems not the case right now) I can tell I had predicted it ;-).

PS: If I had a chrystal ball I was bying a lotery ticket right now.

Grails Tip of the Day: Always use packages

First of all I must say I'm lazy and I don't like overhead... That's also the reason why I don't use packages for Grails domain classes. Most Grails applications I've build so far consist of no more then 20 domain classes, so I had never the need to separate them in packages. In fact I like to have them in the top folder; no overhead of subfolders.

As Grails 1.1 was released I decided to restart Grails on Sakila. I recreated the domain classes including a "Category" domain class. I generated the default Controller and Views without problems and started the application. When browsing to the list page of the Category domain class I got (GRAILS-4233):

Welcome to Grails 1.1 - http://grails.org/
Licensed under Apache Standard License 2.0
Grails home is set to: D:\Grails\grails-1.1

Base Directory: D:\Grails\projects\grails-on-sakila
Running script D:\Grails\grails-1.1\scripts\RunApp.groovy
Environment set to development
  [groovyc] Compiling 2 source files to D:\Users\moverdijk\.grails\1.1\projects\grails-on-sakila\classes
  [groovyc] org.codehaus.groovy.control.MultipleCompilationErrorsException: startup failed, D:\Grails\projects\grails-on-sakila\grails-app\controllers\CategoryController.groovy: 40: You cannot create an instance from the abstract interface 'groovy.lang.Category'.
  [groovyc]  @ line 40, column 32.
  [groovyc]            def categoryInstance = new Category()
  [groovyc]                                   ^
  [groovyc] D:\Grails\projects\grails-on-sakila\grails-app\controllers\CategoryController.groovy: 46: You cannot create an instance from the abstract interface 'groovy.lang.Category'.
  [groovyc]  @ line 46, column 32.
  [groovyc]            def categoryInstance = new Category(params)
  [groovyc]                                   ^
  [groovyc] D:\Grails\projects\grails-on-sakila\grails-app\controllers\CategoryController.groovy: 40: You cannot create an instance from the abstract interface 'groovy.lang.Category'.
  [groovyc]  @ line 40, column 32.
  [groovyc]            def categoryInstance = new Category()
  [groovyc]                                   ^
  [groovyc] D:\Grails\projects\grails-on-sakila\grails-app\controllers\CategoryController.groovy: 46: You cannot create an instance from the abstract interface 'groovy.lang.Category'.
  [groovyc]  @ line 46, column 32.
  [groovyc]            def categoryInstance = new Category(params)
  [groovyc]                                   ^
  [groovyc] D:\Grails\projects\grails-on-sakila\grails-app\controllers\CategoryController.groovy: 40: You cannot create an instance from the abstract interface 'groovy.lang.Category'.
  [groovyc]  @ line 40, column 32.
  [groovyc]            def categoryInstance = new Category()
  [groovyc]                                   ^
  [groovyc] D:\Grails\projects\grails-on-sakila\grails-app\controllers\CategoryController.groovy: 46: You cannot create an instance from the abstract interface 'groovy.lang.Category'.
  [groovyc]  @ line 46, column 32.
  [groovyc]            def categoryInstance = new Category(params)
  [groovyc]                                   ^
  [groovyc] 
  [groovyc] 6 errors
Compilation error: Compilation Failed

First thing I thought I made some mistake but this wasn't the case. The problem is that Groovy resolves the Category class to groovy.lang.Category and not to my Grails domain class. This means if you have domain classes with the same name as a class in groovy.lang and don't use packages you will get into troubles.

So from now on I will create/put my Grails artifacts in a package, which is a good practice anyway. When running the Grails command line scripts to create artifacts you can specify the package so Grails automatically creates the package structure: e.g.:

grails create-domain-class org.company.Book

PS: I you want to read more about Groovy Categories have a look at the Groovy User Guide.

Grails 1.1 I18n Templates and Message Digest Plugin Released

Grails 1.1 was released just a couple of hours ago but I like to announce the availability of the updated I18n Templates Plugin already. Check out the link for more details.

Besides the I18n Templates Plugin I also released another new Message Digest Plugin this evening. This simple plugin provides message digest codecs (currently SHA1 and SHA1Hex) to encode strings easily:

"some string".encodeAsSHA1Hex()

To be honest I think I've "stolen" these codecs from Marc Palmer some time ago... I was working on some home project in which I needed them again so it was time to make a plugin out of it, so everyone can benefit from it. The plugin currently only supports SHA1 and SHA1Hex codecs but I might extend it in the future with MD5 codecs and some other convienient message digesting stuff. Feature requests or patches can be raised at the Grails Plugins JIRA issue tracker.