It just lasted an hour. I would use it if I were more into Facebook.

Google Reader API made Google host the backend for numerous RSS clients like Feedly. The clients could just concentrate on the presentation layer and not worry about the backend. Looks like all these clients have to rethink their strategy now. Maybe this is why Google is shutting down Reader. It does not want to be just a API with no way to make money.

Joshua Bradley Vasanth

My wife and I are blessed with a baby boy. This makes Kaitlyn a big sister!

It worked. Simple. Now I tried to run my script that retrieved the XMLs from a database.

Of course I need the driver jar in the classpath. So I added the sqljdbc.jar to the classpath.

Looks like the script is run with a different classloader and the java classpath is not passed to it. I did some lazy googling but did not find the answer I was looking for. So I looked at how eclipse is doing it. Eclipse used GroovyStarter and GroovyMain to run scripts. Not knowing which to use, I just used GroovyMain:

It worked! I just added the command in a batch file to share the script.

Infinitest is an Eclipse plugin that runs the JUnit tests instantly when you save a Java file. Check out the demo above. It smartly runs only the test affected by the file you just saved. This is cool. You can immediately know if you broke something as soon as you save your code. Of course, your test cases should be comprehensive. Improving Works developed this plugin and has released it as a open source project.

I like the how concise and simple writing groovy scripts are. Here is a snippet of code to print rows retrieved from a database.

At work I needed to retrieve about 100 XMLs stored in a database, strip out some tags from it and write it to a file. It took about 15 lines of Groovy code to do it. Probably could have done it in less but I am just learning Groovy.

Here is another way to use Groovy that I wish I knew before. Embedding Groovy in Ant:

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 <zipfileset id="found" src="foobar.jar"

             includes="**/*.xml"/>

 <groovy>

     project.references.found.each {

         println it.name

     }

 </groovy>

Though the above snippet is simple, it shows how the Groovy script is aware of the Ant references. Pretty powerful.

I will showcase just another snippet before I am off to learn more Groovy. Invoking a web service:

Droid Save [Product Page | Market | AppBrain]

Version 1.6

1. Added offline capability. If there is no internet connection the URLs are saved locally and then sent to Read It Later when connection is back.
2. Added support for special characters in passwords like  ”<”, “|”.

Droid Save IP [Product Page | Market | AppBrain]

Version 1.2

1. Added offline capability. If there is no internet connection the URLs are saved locally and then sent to Read It Later when connection is back.
2. Added support for special characters in passwords like  ”<”, “|”.
3. Added support for accounts without password.

I developed these applications for me to use plus to learn Android development.

The following screenshot has the Smooth Calendar below the weather time widget.  The weather widget is Beautiful Widgets.

The coolest thing is that it has a Laptop Dock! What? Well the concept is not new. Remember Redfly? Or Palm Foleo? But this is better. When docked on to the laptop, you can use the full phone UI and all its apps plus a full desktop Firefox browser and more! See the screenshot below.

Still don’t know what the Webtop OS is but what it offers is pretty cool. It also has a multimedia dock. Looks like I have to start saving for this!

Catch the video of this at laptopmag.com.