The year 2009 is almost over. In good tradition, this post is a recap of what happened to gridshore in this year. I will discuss new technologies as discussed on gridshore.nl. I’ll also talk about important things happened this year on a professional level to myself.
January
January was a month with a lot of activity on gridshore. Allard wrote an article about Spring DM server. I wrote my first blog about springsource entering the flex domain. I learned about the flex actionscript project and the Spring BlazeDS integration project. I wrote additional posts on this flex integration and made my books-overview sample a lot easier. I also wrote about Hippo and how to interact with hippo using a spring component. The connector made use of the CircuitBreaker pattern. Still nice to see that it actually worked to make a more stable interaction solution between the component and an external repository. Ben wrote a very nice post about software design. He used the Parable of the lightbulb to explain some facets of software engineering.
At the end of January Allard started writing about Domain Driven Design. This was an important start of something that got a lot more attention in 2009.
February
February was a very quiet month. Just one post from Freddie to start a discussion about the use of flex in applications.
March
I was to only one to write some posts. Of course there was a flex post, a new milestone release of the spring blazeds integration project was available. I wrote about the upgrade process.
Another post I wrote was about using the Hippo or JackRabbit event mechanism. We used this mechanism in a project to feed a solr instance with new and updated content from hippo. Another post that is nice to mention is the post about reading an rss feed using spring integration. This was the first step in looking more into spring integration and there was more to com in 2009. I ended up using spring integration in a big project for importing content into the hippo content repository.
April
Ben wrote two nice posts with lessons about re-invention and the impact Dijkstra has on computing. I wrote my first article on google app engine that now supports java. I used intellij to create the application.
Another post I created was dealing with flex, BlazeDS and Active MQ. This blog was read a lot and gained a lot of traffic. It is about the first step in a server push to clients of changes made on the server.
May
Was a month of references to posts on other websites, I started blogging on my employers website as well, about content management. Freddie wrote something on the computable website about XML and Ben referred to a blog post from someone else about slow java.
In may I also the post that was the most read post created in 2009. All other posts in the top 10 of most read posts were from 2008 or even earlier. This was the post about integrating spring security in BlazeDS and use Mate on the client. I still think it is to bad the Mate community (which is very small I am afraid) did not pick this up.
June
A very divers month for me. I wrote a post about the google analytics API and a post about serving static files from google app engine. This post has become obsolete with new versions of google app engine.
Another interesting post was about my first journey with Spring roo. Kind of funny to see that in the beginning this post was very high in google search results. A lot of people read it, but I was not very positive. I think the guys from the room team picked it up very well and gave some good comments. Hope to have a new look at it in 2010.
July
This was actually the month of Allard. He wrote more in the Domain Driven Design context. Two posts about the repository interface and the equals method.
July was also the month Allard and myself went to New York to attend a domain driven design training from Eric Evans. Inspired by the new york user group, Allard and I started the DDDNL user group. We spend some time in 2009 to start up this group. We had to meetings and we will have 6 in 2010.
August
Again a post from Ben in a way only Ben can write it. This time about upgrading his windows machine. I wrote my first real post about Domain Driven Design. Not a lot of code, but focussed on what it is and why implementers should want to use it.
September
An excellent blog post from Ben about Bad Science. This post got a very funny comment from someone doing advertising for plastic bottles. Very funny.
I wrote two blog posts this month, one about monitoring your spring application using the Beet framework. Based on some requirements I had for a new project “Your Scrum” I continued my jQuery journey. I wanted to have a screen with a sortable list of backlog items. This turned out to be a serious challenge, but when finished I had a nice solution on the front end as well as the backend.
In september we also had our kick-off meeting for the DDDNL user group.
October
The month of Ben. He wrote two posts. One about using the java reflection api, the other about stuff you can do with Outlook. A blog post about Visual Basic on gridshore?
November
November is about groovy and grails. I attended the Groovy and Grails training from Springsource by Peter ledbrook. This was a very inspiring training and I was surprised by the steps grails has taken since the last time I used it.
For a project I created a small application which is hosted at github. This application was written with grails. In November I also gave a presentation for the NLJug about google app engine. During this presentation I did a live demo of a grails application that was hosted on google app engine.
The second post this month was a bout Groovy. I wrote a blog post about generating a graph with results from the beet monitoring framework. It was amazed by the power of groovy, what took me 10 minutes was estimated by other to take about half a day in java.
December
Allard started his open source framework around Command Query Responsibility segragation. The framework is called CQRS4j.
I wrote a post about starting with grails. This was a milestone post for me. We usually post our blog posts on DZone. We get a lot of traffic through them en often a number of up-votes. For this post I reached the 25 up-posts level. Which makes this a big post according to DZone. The post itzelfs is about an application I am creating using grails. The application deals with some scheduling requests we have to plan what people are going to do the next week.
2010
That was the year 2009, now we are moving into 2010. What will happen to gridshore in 2010? Who knows? In will write more about grails, Allard more about DDD and CQRS. I will also look into CMS. There are grails options for CMS and there is a new spring project that has to do with alfresco. I also want to write more about Spring integration, flex, caching.
Maybe some other interesting things will come up as well. Hope 2010 will be as interesting as 2009. Hope to see you all back.