ChangeLog – Jon Chase's blog

Sometimes (a lot of times) I’ll design a screen or some code and I think “not bad”. Since it’s not bad, it gets my approval and gets moved into production. Thankfully, I often realize that it’s not a bad idea to revisit those designs and see if there’s something I can improve [...]

Alright, no more Groovy posts for a while after this one. In fact, I hadn’t planned on posting about this again, but I thought it was worth mention.
From the last post, we saw the following results for parsing an XML dataset with about 450 simple elements in it 1,000 times:

Java: ~9 seconds
Groovy: ~28 seconds [...]

Following on from the previous post (and here’s the last post), here’s a very quick and dirty, completely unscientific, prone to error, your mileage may vary micro benchmark I did using the code in the last post.
Date set: a String containing roughly 450 XML elements in the form <contact name=”some name” email=”some email” />
Methodology: I [...]

I’ve been trying to slowly integrate some Groovy into my normal Java coding. Here’s just one of the reasons why:

Java code:

Groovy code:

Note that this reduction in complexity happens almost everywhere I choose to use Groovy over Java. Of course there are myriad other ways I could have done this in Java (I even [...]

Today was a very exciting day for SendAlong – it’s release was picked up by several sites (mostly the US and parts of Europe). I was absolutely blown away this morning when I checked the system and saw the number of sign ups – let’s just say it was a bit more than I [...]

Just a quick bit of news that makes me very, very happy to be able to announce:
I’ve officially released SendAlong 1.0!
It’s been a labor of love and…labor, but it’s been worth it.
I’ve got so many things planned for SendAlong – it’s exciting that I’ve finally got 1.0 out the door so that I can refocus [...]

Click on the thumbnail to the left to check out the marketing effectiveness of SendAlong vs. some of its competitors.
Compared to last month, I’ve jumped up in score once again (from 48 to 60 overall). Whoot! Slow and steady wins the race:).
I think a couple of the things I’ve done recently [...]

Andy Glover has a great post about not only continuous integration (the act of having your code base automatically built and tested whenever you commit any changes to it), but continuous production – having your code able to be deployed to production basically at the drop of a hat without manual intervention at any time.
He [...]

Who would have thought that a picture frame could ever be infected with a virus?
We got a very nice frame as a gift this Christmas, and it turns out it’s not feeling so well.
Go figure. Does this mean I need to by McAfee Virus Scan Photoframe Edition?

Is it me, or does it seem like jQuery has been picking up a lot of steam over the past 6 months or so?
It used to be that when I thought Javascript/AJAX library, I thought Prototype. Anymore, however, I think jQuery.