On demand development IDE plugin as a resource to the source code

A cumbersome task which everyone who wants to join a software development project, opensourcy or enterpricy, is setting up the development appropriately. This is becoming more apparent due to the new programming and scripting languages and frameworks like Rails which pop up every now and then. We are getting somewhere (Maven 2)when it comes to making sure the source code compiles and runs out of the box. But the development environments still need to be downloaded, installed, and configured (allthough Maven can help here) and license keys entered.

However, there is hope!

MicroXP just made Windows sexy for development

There are times you have an application or job task which requires windows, and you need a Windows box with the least amount of hassle and small footprint.

Behold MicroXP; a stripped down version of WindowsXP. Match weight: 100MB distro, <500MB HDD, <50MB RAM, ~10min almost inputless installation and <20 second bootup time!!!

Just to test it out for development in parallels, downloaded Java 6 JDK, Maven and tested out the Smacking up Groovy demo in less than 10 seconds which creates a full Java/Groovy development environment with no hassle. And it worked!

Conclusion: Damn sweet footprint! You can propably get your chores done, and still be smiling. Bill Gates won’t love us, but since when has he appreciated Java anyways?

PS. I have been using OS X for over a year, and allthough MicroXP is sweet and sexy, I’m still content with having moved away.

Embedding a Groovy Console in Spring context

In search of the perfect way of adding a console to my Java application, for debugging and test purposes, I stumbled upon the article Embedding a Groovy Console in a Java Server Application by Bruce Fancher. It has a code demo of which runs two flavors of Groovy Consoles from the Spring context of his application. This vantage point gives one access to all the services available to spring, and sits smack in the middle of the most important parts of your application where you can access services and databases. Check out the supplied demo, which still runs nicely with Ant + Tomcat.