Epseelon

To All Startups (in Brussels)

Sébastien — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:34:58 +0000

From January 2012 onward, I'm offering my iPhone/iPad development services for 400€ a day, up to 3 days a week. If a startup needs me 3 days a week, I'll work with one startup. If 3 startups need me for 1 day a week each, I'll work for 3 startups. You get my point.

New Adventures

Sébastien — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 13:59:42 +0000

It's been a while since I posted my last article on this blog, but what is really weird is that I have not mentioned yet what has been bothering my days and nights for the past 8 months.

I’m Really Pissed at Apple Right Now!

Sébastien — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 09:13:52 +0000

Yes, you read that right! Me, the Apple fanboy, the Mac addict. Let me tell you a story. About 5 years ago, when I was still working for Axen, I was offered an ugly heavy PC laptop as a part of my salary package. Given the price of the beast and the fact that I [...]

Grails, Vaadin and Spring Security Core

Sébastien — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:00:36 +0000

I got kind of bored with Flex and all the complexity it introduces by forcing you to switch between ActionScript and whatever you are using for the backend (Groovy in my case). I also got bored with having to regenerate my data service stubs on each server-side change, and having to handle the asynchronous remoting. So I started to have a look at Vaadin.

My Case for DTO’s

Sébastien — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 12:00:40 +0000

In many of my posts about Grails and Flex integration, I take for granted that I use Data Transfer Objects to transfer data between my Grails backend and my Flex frontend. Put simply, Data Transfer Object are pure data containing classes different from the domain entity classes used to store data in the backend. I take it for granted because I'm deeply convinced that it's the best way to do things and so far, experience has never proved me wrong. But I often get this question in comments or by mail (this is for you Martijn): why bother create an entirely separate class structure and copy data from entities to DTO's and back instead of just using entities?

HuddleKit is Out!

Sébastien — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 21:57:21 +0000

That’s it. I spent a whole “wired in” week-end coding it. Four days of submarine work, without a single RSS feed to distract me, with only 50 Twitter followees to keep me connected to the outside “world”. It took me quite some time to realize that what I really missed to get it out was [...]

Flex on Grails, Take 2: Part 3

Sébastien — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 19:26:49 +0000

At the end of the second article in this series, we ended up with a working application but it was not really ready for the real world because it had one major flaw: the URL of the AMF endpoint was hardcoded in the client in such a way that it was impossible to change after compilation and very hard to handle several environments (dev, test, prod). The solution to that problem is to integrate dependency injection into the mix.

JVM Web Framework Survey, First Results

Sébastien — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:24:30 +0000

Yesterday at Devoxx, Matt Raible did a very interesting talk on comparing JVM web frameworks. On this occasion he had the incredible courage of voicing his opinion on each of the most well-known frameworks, rating them in a matrix and the craziest part: showing this matrix to everyone. Immediately after his talk, Twitter was on [...]

Flex on Grails: Take 2, Part 2

Sébastien — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:23:11 +0000

todolist2This is a follow-up post to Flex on Grails, Take 2.

Flex on Grails: Take 2

Sébastien — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 23:36:47 +0000

When I first discovered Flex, one of my first obsessions was how to make it work with a Java backend. I'm a java developer at heart and my Java backend stack of choice back then was Spring/Hibernate-based. That's why I published a series of full-stack articles that became quite popular. But another obsession of mine has always been productivity so when I discovered Grails, it became my new preferred environment and I started looking for ways to plug a Flex frontend into a Grails backend. All of this work culminated in the release of my Grails BlazeDS plugin which worked great but had a few limitations (only Java DTO's, run-war instead of run-app, etc.). I mean, it worked great... until it didn't.