Digital learnings and other such nonsense…
Cloud & Web Development
Bootstrapping a Grails application to prepopulate data on startup
0148 days
I’ve been dabbling in a little Grails recently, and I found it quite frustrating having to re-enter some sample data everytime I restarted my application, in order to have the views look meaningful.
Fortunately, theres an easy solution, just do all of your setup in the Bootstrapper class like so :
Deploying a grails application to Cloudbees
0148 days
I spent much of last weekend experimenting with the grails framework, so I wanted to deploy what I had in the cloud. Theres a big tutorial on the IntelliJ IDEA documentation (the screenshots don’t seem to match my installation of IDEA, even though its the same version number).
There is a much easier way, providing you have the Cloudbees SDK installed, you can just run this one-liner :
grails war; bees app:deploy target/MyWarFile.war -a mycloudbeesusername/applicationcontainernamehere
The above will package the application as a war file, and then deploy it to your Cloudbees instance.
Override the toString on your domain classes so they display as something useful
0148 days
If you’re finding that your domain objects are not being displayed in a readable manner, chances are its because they haven’t been told to. This is often the case in drop down menus that the grails scaffolding creates. You can easily fix this by overriding the toString method on your domain class, such as the following.
class Question {
String text
static hasMany = [responses: Response]
static constraints = {
text()
responses()
}
String toString(){
return text
}
}
Deploying the android libraries into your maven repository
0304 days
Maven is a fantastic build tool, and a great addition to anyone developing on the android platform, however one of the first hurdles that people often stumble upon, is when their project involves one of the SDK libraries, such as Google Maps.
You’ll most likely see something like this when you attempt to first compile the project :
Deploying artefacts into your CloudBees maven repositories.
1335 days
If you’re like me, and have a fair few hobby projects on the go at any one time, you’re may want to take advantage of some of the free cloud services that are available out there. I’m particulary fond of the Maven repositories that CloudBees offer, as it gives you a safe and easy way to deploy your artefacts, whether they’re 3rd party libraries, snapshots, or even releases of your own software.
Head over to CloudBees.com and register an account, its free.
Sending Tweets from your iOS5 app, easy!
0337 days
Sending a tweet from your iOS application could not be any easier, Apple and Twitter really were looking out for their developers.
With iOS 5, the twitter account is authenticated under the settings menu of the device, which means that any application can request this account to use for tweet, and that is all you need to do; sign in, then request these details in your application.
Follow these easy steps
Sign into twitter on your phone
Go to Settings > Twitter > Sign in, as displayed below
Top 10 Techie things I want to achieve in 2012
0543 days
I’m not the type of person that gets bored easily, I’ve always got many things to keep me amused, mostly side projects at home. I’m a firm believer, that if you don’t set yourself goals in the first place, then you won’t have anything to fail to achieve, so I’ve set myself a list of targets that I’d like to achieve in 2012 knowing full well I probably won’t get around to them all, but if I can do at least 3, it was worth it.
Android; how to display a map the easy way..
9866 days
I’m seeing countless questions, literally on a daily basis on StackOverflow regarding using maps on Android. To be honest I’ve never come across these problems but it seems many people have trouble using the maps in their application, so I’ll provide a clear and easy set of instructions on how to do this.
Common issues
- API key is incorrect
- You are using the standard Android emulator and not the Google APIs.
- You have extended Activity instead of MapActivity
Integrating your wordpress into twitter and facebook, the easy way
0949 days
by James Elsey
in Wordpress
I’ve been searching for a viable and easy solution for integrating my wordpress posts into facebook and twitter for some time now, and have finally found an easy solution, it takes about all of 10 minutes to setup. Twitter is essentially the “integration hub” in this process
What I’m trying to achieve : When I post a new blog post onto my wordpress site, I want it to appear in a tweet on my twitter account (with a link), and then to also appear on my status/wall on my facebook account.
What you need to do :
Tutorial; How to call Yahoo! REST web services the easy way!
0988 days
I’ve got some requirements where I need to call a REST web service from an Android device, so I figured I’d get back to basics, and try to call a REST service through a simple Java application, just to see if I can get it working.
After trawling the web for what seemed like hours, I was finally able to come up with a simple yet effective solution. Consider the following
