ChangeLog – Jon Chase's blog

Holla! I just flipped the switch on Every Single Shot 1.0! If it’s on Twitter it must be a fact:

This has been the culmination of a lot of work! Oh sure, it’s still a little rough around the edges for now, but isn’t that part of the charm? I’ve got big, big plans for the future of ESS, and I’m super excited that I’ve gotten this far. I don’t know how else to say it: it’s been a lot of work. Worth it? Definitely!

Technical stuff

What’s ESS built on? What technologies does it use? What methodologies did I use to build it?

The tech

Grails

First and foremost, I used Grails for pretty much everything. I was a Spring MVC veteran for a long time, and let me tell you, I knew my way around that stack inside and out. There was nothing I couldn’t accomplish with it, albeit with a bit of elbow grease usually. I decided to move to Grails for this application b/c it was so similar to Spring MVC in so many ways (it’s built on top of Spring MVC for one), but different where it really counted (i.e. it made the simple stuff really simple, and the tough stuff, well, less tough). I have no regrets and I don’t see myself ever going back.

Grails report card: A++

Amazon EC2 and S3

Can I get another holla! I love love love working on EC2 and S3. Let me put it this way: have you ever used a technology or toolset that just works? I mean, one that always does exactly what it’s supposed to without fail? Well, I hadn’t either until I used EC2 and S3. They are so damn reliable, so rock solid, so well documented and supported. Basically, they’re awesome. I know there are other services out there with more bells and whistles, and I’ll be honest, I had to build a lot of infrastructure in EC2 myself that I wish I hadn’t needed to, but AWS’s stability and predictability more than make up for it. For 10 cents an hour I get a dedicated (virtual) server with lots of RAM, a huge disk, and some crazy fast connectivity. Scripting set up and configuration of servers couldn’t be much easier than with good ol’ runurl. Management of servers is super easy with the command line tools. Rawk on.

Amazon AWS report card: A++

Other tech

Here are some of the other technologies that various parts of Every Single Shot use in no particular order: apt (this is one reason that Linux rocks), Apache 2, apticron, awstools, ec2-consistent-snapshot (Eric Hammond is the man when it comes to EC2 and Ubuntu), Groovy, ImageMagick, Java, Jquery, MySQL, postfix, Subversion (I know, I know…), and Tomcat. All in all you can see there’s not a lot of glamour tools in there, just a bunch of stuff that works.

Methodologies

Gosh, I wish I could be more specific, but I pretty much just had a big list of issues, loosely divided into versions, organized in Jira (I got my Jira license for $10). That’s it. No agile, no scrum, no scragile or whatever. Just cranked through issues.

Here’s something interesting: I used to do a lot of TDD (test driven development). I’ve abandoned that lately in favor of writing tests…never. Actually, since I’ve started with Grails I’ve written a lot fewer tests that I used to with Spring MVC. Part of this is due to the fact that there’s a lot less that needs testing in Grails, and part of it is due to the fact that tests in Grails can be a little tough to write (there’s a lot of meta programming magic happening, and I miss Java autocomplete), and a lot of the tests run kinda slow (the entire container has to start up a lot of the time). Enough about testing though (let the flame wars begin).

I could go on…

Believe me, I have lots more to talk about, lots more I want to say about the 1.0 release of Every Single Shot. But that’ll have to wait. I need to get back to work! 2.0 is calling me…