My Secret Life as a Spaghetti Coder
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JetBrains recently announced that IntelliJ IDEA will be open-sourced and have an Apache 2.0-licensed version with the release of 9.0.

Those who've been reading My Secret Life as a Spaghetti Coder for a long time will know I totally love IDEA.

I haven't written software in Java for quite some time, and I don't normally do "news" posts, but I know enough of you are into Java, Groovy, and Scala to make this worth your while if the $249 was pricey enough to force you into using lesser Java IDEs. Now you don't have to.

Get it and I don't think you'll be disappointed. But don't wait until 10.0. As Cedric Beust pointed out (and I'm inclined to agree), "IDEA going opensource means that it will now slowly die."

I hope not, of course, but one has to wonder.

Hey! Why don't you make your life easier and subscribe to the full post or short blurb RSS feed? I'm so confident you'll love my smelly pasta plate wisdom that I'm offering a no-strings-attached, lifetime money back guarantee!



The first talk I attended at NFJS was Scott Davis's presentation about Groovy, and how it lives up to its name (you know, its grrrooovy baby!) The presentation went through the death of Java, how Groovy fills a need that Java misses, some sample code for utility programs, and finally a short introduction to Grails. Download Groovy As a disclaimer, I give Scott Davis all the credit for the good stuff here. I'm just reporting from my notes, his slides, and my memory, so any mistakes you find are probably mine. If they aren't, they probably should have been. More...


Sean Corfield responded in some depth to "Is Rails easy?", and explained what I wish I could have when I said (awkwardly, rereading it now) "I think my cat probably couldn't [code a Rails app]."

Sean makes it quite clear (as did Venkat's original post) that it isn't that using a framework, technology, or tool in general is easy or hard (although, you can certainly do things to make it easier or harder to use). In many cases, what it does for you is easy to begin with - in the case of Rails, it is stuff you do all the time that amounts to time-wasting, repetitive, boring busy-work. Rather, the right way to look at them is that they are tools that make you more productive, and it takes a while to learn to use them.

If you go into them thinking they are easy, you're likely to be disappointed and drop a tool that can really save you time before you learn to use it. And that could be tragic, if you value your time.


Want to get a report of a certain session? I'll be attending No Fluff Just Stuff in Austin, Texas at the end of June. So, look at all that's available, and let me know what you'd like to see.

I haven't yet decided my schedule, and it's going to be tough to do so. I'm sure to attend some Groovy and JRuby sessions, but I don't know which ones. In any case, I want to try to leave at least a couple of sessions open for requests, so feel free to let me know in the comments what you'd like to see. (No guarantees though!). Here's what I'm toying with so far (apologies in advance for not linking to the talks or the speakers' blogs, there are far too many of them =)): More...


Peter Bell's presentation on LightWire generated some comments I found very interesting and thought provoking. (Perhaps Peter is not simply into application generation, but comment generation as well.)

The one I find most interesting is brought up by several people whose opinions I value - Joe Rinehart, Sean Corfield, Jared Rypka-Hauer, and others during and after the presentation. That is: what is the distinction between code and data, and specifically, is XML code or data (assuming there is a difference)? More...


I don't plan to pick up Groovy/Grails for quite some time (maybe next year?), but if/when I do, I wanted to have this link handy (and plus, if you are getting into it, it might be helpful for you as well!).

Anyway, Scott Davis (who you may know from No Fluff Just Stuff) has recently released AboutGroovy.com.



It had been a while since I visited InfoQ, but the other day I got one of their mailings in my inbox, and tons of it was relevant to my interests (even more so than normal). Rather than having a separate post for all of it, I decided to combine much of it into this post.

First, this post let me know that Thoughtworks has released CruiseControl.rb, which is good news for Ruby users who also want continuous integration. I've yet to use it, but those guys are a great company and it seems like everything they touch turns to gold. More...


I've seen a couple of posts around the ColdFusion world lately about the programming language, Groovy (which runs on the JVM). If you're interested in learning Groovy and using it for web application development, the framework Grails is for you. And even better, InfoQ has just released Getting Started with Grails. It's a free 131-page PDF mini-book available for download now. You can also buy the print version for just under 20 bucks.



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