ALTERthought Blogs Archives: How-Tos
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18 September 2009
Grails and Cloud Computing: Part 1 – Amazon EC2
Progress to Date
This entry is a part of the ‘What can you build in 40hrs‘ series– which, in a nutshell, involved an experiment to see what we could build in about typical weeks worth of work. In the last post we effectively completed the basic functional requirements of the application, and now have a [...]
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3 September 2009
Grails App in ~40 hrs (part 5)
Welcome back to our effort to build a Grails app in less than a week. This post will cover the final functional aspects of the application, after which we can move on to trying to deploy the app into a Cloud Computing platform.
To recap briefly our progress to date:
Part 1: We introduce the basic [...]
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17 August 2009
Grails App in ~40 hrs (part 4)
The last post covered the kickoff to the ‘twodo‘ application– where we created our Grails application, wired in JSecurity via plugin, and created a few of the core Domain objects the system will need.
In this post we will refine the general look and feel of the User Interface, as well as start building the core [...]
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10 August 2009
Building a Grails App in ~40 hrs (part 3)
In part 1 and part 2 of this series we introduced a challenge to build a reasonably non-trivial application in just a week. We have decided on Grails as the primary technology framework, and once we have a prototype working, we hope to deploy it to a cloud computing platform like Google’s AppEngine [...]
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15 July 2009
Beyond velocity: issue metrics
Continuing our series on beefing up the Agile dashboard with ‘leading indicator’ type metrics, let’s discuss project issues. First, let’s get on the same page on the definition. A good way to understand the definition of an issue is to compare to that of a risk. So, what’s the difference between and issue and a [...]
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5 June 2007
5 Ingredients for the Application Development ROI Soup
Fact: The way most of us in the industry calculate Return on Investment (ROI) for software application development is broken.
As we continue to work with our partners, competitors, and clients, I am continually stunned by how companies quantify the business value gained from application development and integration work they perform. Typically, its an after-the-fact analysis [...]
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13 December 2006
Licence Management for Java Web Applications Using Aspects
This post provides step by setp instruction on implementing license management for Java web applications. I have used open source product TrueLicense for license management and aspects to weave the license verification into the code.
TrueLicense Library Collection(TLC) is a collection of Java packages to securely create, install and verify license for closed source products. TLC [...]
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20 July 2006
Developing RESTful Web Services in Java
When you think of Web services, SOAP immediately comes to your mind. Not any more! Thanks to REST, there is a simpler way to develop web services. While SOAP is well established with most vendors supporting it, REST is really catching up.
Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems. REST relies [...]
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29 June 2006
Integrating Spring and the Struts Validator (transparently)
A client recently approached my company looking for specialized training/mentoring on how to introduce the Spring framework into their Struts fronted J2EE applications. One of the topics of particular interest was a desire to use Spring to (somehow) apply the same validation rules that are implemented in the Struts Validator for their UI to [...]
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17 April 2006
Use Linux to Recover a Corrupted Windows Drive
This entry was originally posted on an earlier incarnation of this blog. It still seems to have some merit, so I have re-posted it.
So I was the unfortunate victim a harddrive hardware failure. Repeated WindowsXP CHKDSK runs did nothing to fix the problem and I came to the painful realization that I needed a [...]

