Over the last couple months I’ve been taking a bit of spare time to write something that I hope all of us can benefit from: GroovyRTM

What is GroovyRTM?

GroovyRTM allows you to easily take advantage of the Remember The Milk REST API using any language on the JVM. In short, you can now write apps for Remember The Milk without having to worry about all the HTTP transaction stuff, error handling, etc. As its name implies, it’s written in Groovy, which made it much easier to write and test.

How can I use it?

To get started, you’ll need 3 things:

1. Download groovyrtm-all.jar from the project on kenai.com
2. Request an API key (you’ll probably want an RTM account to test it with, too)
3. Create a RtmService.properties file as explained in the project Wiki

Just how easy is it? Suppose you want to write a little Java app that adds a new task:

import org.eriwen.rtm.*;

class MyGroovyRtmTest {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        RtmService groovyrtm = new RtmService();
        groovyrtm.tasksAdd("Try GroovyRTM!");
    }
}

It’s that easy! Now, it’s a little deceiving because the first time your app runs you have to allow it access via the RTM website. The best part is… it’s open source! You can check out the source with Mercurial:

hg clone https://kenai.com/hg/groovyrtm~mercurial groovyrtm

Awesome! Can I help?

Of course! Get the code, give me suggestions, use it and tell me what you think. I am willing to add people to the project that show me their interest and some good Groovy code. Just hit up the forum or use my contact form for questions or suggestions.

If you think it’s cool but you can’t use it, help me get it out there by digging it or voting on your favorite aggregator.

Related posts:

1. Get groovy for better shell scripts
2. Crush images on the command-line with Groovy
3. Using Groovy Categories to override operators

Today I’m going to explain the use of features like history, brace and file expansion, and other tricks by example and give you references for later.

Master your history

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. This is arguably one of the best productivity enhancing features of any shell.

You can check your history with the history command, which prints your last 500 commands (or so) by default. Alternatively, you can filter the list:

# Print last 10 entries
history 10

# searches history for cmd
history | grep cmd

Each entry has a number, which you can then execute with !<number>

Now suppose I want to copy a file to a directory and then change to that directory. The quick way to do that with history is:

cp myfile.txt my/directory/path
cd !$  # cd my/directory/path

or if I forget to run a command as super-user:

vi /etc/fstab  # oops!
sudo !!  # sudo vi /etc/fstab

to execute the last command starting with "mount", since I don’t want to type it all out:

# Previously...
mount 192.168.0.100:/my/path/to/music /media/music

# Later...
!mount
# Repeats last mount command

Note that I often (but not always) prefer Ctrl-R, which will search history as you type. As an added bonus you can view the command before executing it.

Other examples:

eric@sawyer:~$ echo foo -a bar baz
foo -a bar baz
eric@sawyer:~$ echo !:3-4
bar baz
eric@sawyer:~$ !-2 #2nd-to-last command
foo -a bar baz
eric@sawyer:~$ ^ba^ya #replace 1st "ba" with "ya"
foo -a yar baz
eric@sawyer:~$ !^:p #MUCH cooler than "echo ..." ;)
foo
eric@sawyer:~$ !?bar #Last command containing "bar"
foo -a bar baz
eric@sawyer:~$ !:gs/ba/ya #replace all "ba" with "ya"
foo -a yar yaz

Quick reference

Download as PDF

Helpful .bashrc entries for history

Copy and paste these into ~/.bashrc

# Don't put duplicate lines in the history
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
# Ignore successive duplicate entries.
export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth

# Store a lot history entries in a file for grep-age
shopt -s histappend
export HISTFILE=~/long_history
export HISTFILESIZE=50000

# No reason not to save a bunch in history
# Takes up several more MBs of RAM now, oOOOooh
export HISTSIZE=9999

# Ignore dupe commands and other ones you don't care about
export HISTIGNORE="&:[ ]*:exit"

Another neat trick with .inputrc

If you are still particularly fond of the up and down arrows, copy and paste the following into a ~/.inputrc file. This will allow you to start typing a command and then hit the up-arrow to search backwards through your history for commands starting with what you typed. I prefer other methods usually but this is pretty cool, huh?

"\eOA": history-search-backward
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\eOB": history-search-forward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
"\eOC": forward-char
"\e[C": forward-char
"\eOD": backward-char
"\e[D": backward-char

Further reading

Peteris Krumins has an excellent write-up called The Definitive Guide to Bash Command Line History which goes in-depth on many of the above topics, should you crave more bash history goodness.

Brace expansions

No shorthand list would be complete without the (in)famous brace expansions. Basically, they allow you to specify part(s) of an command to repeat substituting different values of a set within braces. Let me show you what I mean:

# Quickly make a backup
cp file.txt{,.bak}
# Equivalent to 'cp file.txt file.txt.back'

This is obviously very useful to prevent having to repeat parts of files or directory paths.

Suppose I wanted to make a template folder structure, I could make most of the directories I need with:

mkdir -p {src,test}/com/eriwen/{data,view}

This will expand every combination so I end up with src/com/eriwen/data, src/com/eriwen/view, test/com/eriwen/data, and so forth. Being able to create a template directory structure with one line is a big time saver!

Better filename expansion

I'm sure you often use the * operator to match files beginning or ending with something, but bash goes far beyond that. It should be noted, though, at some point a good find | grep is more powerful and useful. See Find is a beautiful tool for more information.

In addition to wildcards with *, you can use ? to match any single character. You can also limit matching to certain characters with []. For example:

ls
# prints "myfile netbeans.conf netbeans-6.5rc2 netbeans-6.5 netbeans-6.7 src"
ls netbeans-6.?
# matches "netbeans-6.5 netbeans-6.7"
ls netbeans-6.[1-5]*
# matches "netbeans-6.5rc2 netbeans-6.5"

.bashrc entries for better filename expansion

# Include dot (.) files in the results of expansion
shopt -s dotglob
# Case-insensitive matching for filename expansion
shopt -s nocaseglob
# Enable extended pattern matching
shopt -s extglob

cd shorthand

There are a couple quick tricks to change to oft-used directories. For example:

# Lame way to go home
cd ~

# The cool way
cd

You can also switch to the previous directory with cd - like so:

pwd  # prints /home/eriwen/src
cd /my/webserver/directory

# Do something...

cd -
# Now I'm back in /home/eriwen/src

To get more advanced with this, try mastering your directory stack with pushd and popd.

Conclusion

Effective use of history, brace expansions, and other shortcuts will to save you a lot of time. However, nothing is more productive than no typing. Automating things is best where possible. If you can't automate, use smart aliases.

I know I did not cover tilde expansions, shell parameter expansions or bash key commands. You will want to check those out as well, but I find them less useful than what I've covered here.

Have any quick shortcuts you love? Share them in the comments!

Related posts:

1. grep is a beautiful tool
2. Using aliases and command-line functions for speed
3. Start using crontab for automation

A bit of Groovy background

A couple key features of Groovy are that everything is an object and that operators are just syntactic sugar for calling methods on the objects. What’s cool about this is that with Groovy you can override the default behavior of these operators for certain classes. For example, 4 + 2 in Groovy really means 4.plus(2)

How to implement/override operators in Groovy

Groovy allows you to override a LOT of stuff, including final methods and operators. If I want to override a method on the String class, all I need to do is:

String.metaClass.plus {
    //It is a special term for the argument passed (if there is only 1)
    String stringToEncode = it
    //delegate is a special term for the caller of the method
    delegate << URLEncoder.encode(it, 'UTF-8')
}

String first = "my delegate "
String second = "twitter @eriwen"
//prints "my delegate twitter+%40eriwen"
println first + second

Notice that it (intentionally) only encodes the second String. Check out the list of operators and associated methods. This is great, but I need to restrict this to code blocks I so choose. That’s where Groovy Categories come in.

Overriding with Categories

Groovy Categories allow you to add functionality to any class at runtime. This means that you can add in methods to final classes (like java.lang.String). In this case I just want to override a method instead of adding one.

class MyUtils {
  //Takes 2 java.lang.Strings and returns a String - TYPES ARE OPTIONAL
  static String plus(String first, String second) {
    //Concatenates the Strings and returns
    first << URLEncoder.encode(second, encoding)
  }
}

//my other class in another file...
import MyUtils

class MyOtherClass {
  String first = "first"
  String second = "to be encoded"
  use (MyUtils) {
    // This will now encode value
    list << first + second
  }
}

Note that Groovy defaults to GStrings, so you can’t just use def actuallyMyString.

How would you make this even more Groovy? Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Crush images on the command-line with Groovy
2. Get groovy for better shell scripts
3. Introducing GroovyRTM: A Groovier way to Remember The Milk

Restrain yourself from making fun of my geeky voice and focus instead on the awesomeness of Selenium, a fantastic web-application testing tool. I talk about what Selenium is, some features and uses, and speculate on possible future extensions.

The interview starts at the 12th minute or so. That said, I have learned a lot from these guys and think you’d benefit from giving their podcast a listen.

Check it out!

Related posts:

1. Firefox extension to watch: Firecookie
2. A quick way to backup a Firefox extension or profile
3. Firefox add-ons for productivity

One really cool thing about Ubiquity is that you don’t have to type “add-to-calendar blah blah”. If you type “add”, Ubiquity will figure out what you want so you just have to type: “add beer with David Walsh at 9pm” and it will figure it out. If you have text selected, just type “this” and it will insert the selected text into that part of the command.

Get started with Ubiquity

While using Firefox, download the Ubiquity Firefox extension. Once you have it, you can install extra commands by clicking any of the command links above. You can summon Ubiquity with Ctrl-Space by default, but this is easily changed. That’s all!

Ubiquity is better to…

1. Manage your calendar – Adding an event to your Google Calendar should be painless in every situation. The add-to-calendar and check-calendar commands let you do so easily.
2. Update your status – Ubiquity comes with tweet, but you can grab an enhanced tweet command. There are commands for Facebook, FriendFeed, and ping.fm as well.
3. Share links A lot of sites provide links so you can share links. If not, though, you can do so easily using the digg (built-in), reddit, stumbleupon, delicious, dzone and other places.
4. Shorten URLs – You can shorten links in-line by selecting it and using tinyurl (built-in), is.gd, tr.im and hurl
5. Read languages you don’t know – Gone are the days you “go” to Google Translate. Now you just highlight some text on a web page, call up Ubiquity, and type translate this to English (or whatever).
6. Manage your to-do list – I use Remember the Milk to manage to-do lists that my whole family can share. Now there’s a remember the milk command so it’s always just a keystroke away.
7. Lookup programming APIs – Very often I find myself having to look up available methods or something. This is faster using specific searches like those for the Java API, Pydoc, or jquery. You can also do things like W3C site validation

What next?

1. Watch Aza Raskin’s video intro to Ubiquity. Seeing it in action is much cooler than just reading.
2. Check out other Ubiquity commands
3. Write your own command. Instructions. It’s so easy, I could do it!

Bonus: I wrote you a command :) Here’s a dzone command, since I couldn’t find one out there. Enjoy!

Share your favorite Ubiquity commands in the comments!

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2. Using aliases and command-line functions for speed
3. Firefox add-ons for productivity

In it, I explain a bit about how browser caching works, how setting headers can affect caching and what you can use in your .htaccess file (or Apache httpd.conf) to maximize it.

Go check it out!

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1. Guest Post: Save Text Size Preference Using MooTools and PHP
2. Guest Post: change text size onclick with JavaScript
3. 8 steps to my personal Firefox setup for productivity

Good resources I’ve found

I have found some good resources online for Python and Jython, but I know I didn’t find them all so if you Python-istas could put some in the comments I’d be very grateful :)

1. The somewhat famous Python is not Java article
2. Python Documentation Index
3. Python 2.6.1 Docs
4. Python Language Notes by Chris Rathman
5. The Jython Project

What I like so far

I like that a lot of common operations are very easy. Take for example:

# 3 Hellos in Python
hellos = 'Hello ' * 3

as opposed to

// 3 Hellos in Java
String hellos = "";
for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
    hellos += "Hello ";
}

There are a bunch of other features that come to mind, like string formatting, list manipulation, and variable and default-valued arguments. Oh, and of course closures are very straightforward (many thanks to Arnar for a real closure example):

def outer(your_name):
    title = random.choice(["Mr", "Mrs", "Miss"])

    def greeter(greeting):
        print greeting, title, your_name

    return greeter

g = outer("Eric")  # invoke it

# g now contains a reference to the inner
# function, but as it references variables
# from the local scope of outer, the invocation
# data has been stored in a closure
# Execution of outer is finished, but g can
# still reference its local variables through
# the closure:

g("Hi")  # prints "Hi Miss Eric" :D

I could go on and on, but you really ought to read the documentation to see all of its features. Actually there’s not all that much to it!

Troubles I have with it

I wish I could find more documentation with simple code examples. I’m sure there are a bunch of blog posts out there but it’d be nice if there were more included with the documentation.

Passing arguments by reference doesn’t seem to be possible, which is fine, but different. I’m not totally used to the lack of curly braces, but I like the fact that you must have good formatting to have runnable Python. I was surprised to learn that Python is strongly typed which in some way I think is odd because it seems like it’d be simpler if it was weakly typed.

a = "17"
b = 25
print a + b  # Nope!

One last thing is classes. I’m not sure I have my head around how they really work in Python. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it soon.

Conclusion

Overall I’m thoroughly impressed with the language. There almost seems to be a Zen-like aura around Python code that is written with the simplicity the language creators intended.

Obviously I still have a lot to learn, so please help me out if you have some advice in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Get groovy for better shell scripts
2. Using Groovy Categories to override operators

Check out the slide deck »

What I covered

1. What is JavaFX and why do you care?
2. Comparisons between Java and JavaFX syntax
3. JavaFX language features
4. Building a sample application
5. Platform support
6. Additional resources

How I approached the talk

I took Fred Jean’s advice and used the Codex presentation system which is a Ruby gem that adds to Eric Meyer’s S5. Unlike Fred, though, I opted to use Mercurial to keep track of versioning.

To get some good practice for my talk I hosted a brown-bag discussion at Sun. This was a good idea because it made sure I was prepared fairly early and I got good feedback from my co-workers. Hopefully they learned something as well. I ended up about 20 minutes short during my brown-bag so I added 10 more slides (which hardly helped… I talked much too fast).

What I would change

Since I ran so short at BJUG, I’d probably try to talk about more JavaFX language features and explain them in greater detail than I did. Making jokes during the presentation seemed to go over very well and I might throw in a couple more.

If you missed my talk, you can Check out the slides. I hope the speak about this again at the Denver JUG later this year. Hope to see you there!

Related posts:

1. How to add JavaFX to SyntaxHighlighter
2. Holiday fun with JavaFX
3. What I wanted to know before I left college: A programmer reflects