bitwalker.nl » groovy

AppleScript with Groovy

Harald Walker — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:08:56 +0000

Today I was looking into Java and AppleScript to see what is possible. But since Java has this nice little brother called Groovy, I wanted to try to execute AppleScript from within a Groovy script. With Java SE 6 AppleScript has been provided as a ScriptEngine to the javax.script API, which makes using it much easier. My little example script opens an URL in the default browser, takes a screenshot and notifies the user.

import javax.script.*
 
def takeScreenshot = """\
open location \"http://www.bitwalker.nl\"
delay 5
do shell script \"screencapture screenshot.pdf\"
"""
 
ScriptEngineManager mgr = new ScriptEngineManager()
ScriptEngine engine = mgr.getEngineByName("AppleScript")
engine.eval(takeScreenshot)
engine.eval("say \"Your screenshot is ready\"")

You can run this directly in the GroovyConsole or as regular Groovy script. Don’t forget to set JAVA_HOME to 1.6.

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Using GroovyServer Pages in Dreamweaver

Harald Walker — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:55:06 +0000

We started using Grails in our current project for one of the internal web-applications. Grails uses GroovyServer Pages (gsp) for web pages and layout templates (you can also use JSP instead). As I don’t like to use Eclipse for web-design tasks, I figured out how to add gsp support to Dreamweaver (CS3).

Step 1: Add .gsp file extension
Edit the Extensions.txt file, which can be found here:
Windows: \Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
Mac OS X: /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Dreamweaver 9/Configuration
Add a new line with GSP:Groovy Server Pages and add the gsp extension to the first line. Restart Dreamweaver, which will now recognize the .gsp files and open them in the editor.
Next, add the following code to configuration/DocumentTypes/MMDocumentTypes.xml
<br /> <MMString:loadString id="mmdocumenttypes_70" /><br /> html
Adjust the id values if necessary. In the folder NewDocuments create a Default.gsp file. Gsp files are not being shown as option in the new files dialog yet, so the Default file is not being used. If someone knows how to do this, please let me know.
It takes adobe a couple of pages to explain it all in detail: http://www.adobe.com/go/16410

Step 2: Add the gsp tag library
Download the GspTagLibrary for Dreamweaver, unpack it and copy the gsp folder to the TagLibraries folder within the configuration folder. Add the text of gspTagLibrary.vtm to the existing TagLibraries.vtm file.

Step 3: Enable code coloring
Open CodeColoring.xml (Configuration/CodeColering) in an editor and add gsp to the doctypes attribute of the entries for Html, JavaScript and CSS. Restart Dreamweaver.

Next step could be to add a special color schema for gsp tags and groovy when using scriptlets and maybe one day I will have time to learn how to write Dreamweaver Extensions, which would hopefully make it possible to do all of this automatically.

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Rails and Grails and Java

Harald Walker — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 21:33:56 +0000

Last Friday Charles Nutter from Sun and Graeme Rocher from Skills Matter presented Ruby On Rails (mostly JRuby On Rails) and Grails at the profict Summer Camp in the beautiful Loenen (Duch countryside). Both started with a short introduction to the core languages of both frameworks – Ruby (JRuby) and Groovy – with a focus on Java related issues. Among other things they demonstrated quick and easy ways to create Swing interfaces. Charles used Profligacy and Cheri, while Graeme did it with the Groovy SwingBuilder. In both languages it allowed faster Swing development with less and easier code. While this was appealing, I still believe that what Swing needs most of all, are good GUI builder applications which designers can directly use.

Next, they went on showing us the Ruby On Rails (ROR) and Grails frameworks and of course demonstrated the fast creation of a simple working web-application (those famous 10 minute demos). If you want to know more about it, just follow the links, read the introduction and watch the screencasts.

Both Grails and Rails (when used with JRuby) allow integration with Java and a Java infrastructure. Charles for example used the rome library in Rails to generate an RSS feed and the next version of the GlassFish application server will offer special support for deployment of Rails applications. So the idea is, why not combine the best of both worlds (Grails & Java or Rails & Java).

As Groovy is a dynamic language written for the JVM and shares a lot of similarities with Java, I think it might be more suitable for Java teams and environments than Ruby. Grails itself is based on solid java components like Spring, hibernate, quartz, sitemesh, embedded jetty and hsqldb (80% of grails is written in Java) and offers various java related plugins (e.g. for DWR, Wicket, xFire,…). The 0.6 release of Grails (available as release candidate) will offer integrated support for Spring Webflow and the 1.0 release is due in October.

All in all it has been an inspiring afternoon and no matter if you favor Ruby, Grooy, Grails or Rails, these are exiting developments and if you can, learn something new and give it a try. I started to learn Ruby & ROR a while ago but never really had a chance to use it practically. With Groovy & Grails I think it might be different as the demand for lean and agile java development is growing.

More photos on Flickr

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