development

iOS development projects are not first-in-class when it comes to managing the quality of the software produced. Very short projects, very short time-to-market, it is not the kind of projects where you see a lot of attention towards quality, unfortunately. Here at OCTO we try to do it differently, even for this kind of projects. Or above all, for that matter. But here comes another issue: the lack of tooling. Here is one of our latest attempt to setup quality metrics on a short and…

There is one major flaw you must have encountered whilst working with Silverlight for a while: its incompatibility with unit tests! Unless you’ve been using Silverlight solely for drawing circles and rectangles, surely you must have tried to use the Silverlight Toolkit unit test project template to try to put some TDD in your project ! ...most probably you were disappointed by it because it’s fairly poor...

After working more than a year on different projects using PowerShell (v1 and v2), I would like to share with you some Best practices that I could identify. I decided to write this article when I realized that I was always using the same tips/tricks and asking people working with PowerShell to use them as well. Some of the tips that I’ll give may seem stupid and/or quite common (not to say mandatory), in the development world... But scripting is not really part of the…

What the f*** is a Groovy Minute? I am thinking about starting a new kind of post about Groovy. Publishing short articles on a regular basis where I will give some Groovy hints and try to exchange on Groovy code with others. That's what a "Groovy Minute" stands for, some Groovy minutes in your day-to-day work -and mine. Not sure at what pace I will do it it but I am willing to publish something each time I come with some worthy-to-share Groovy code. That's…

Groovy and Grails are a breeze of fresh air in Java development and Web application development as they enable you to write far more expressive and readable code. They also solve most of the classic Java pitfalls (BigDecimal, equals(), etc…) all new Java programmers meet along their way. Even if you write more readable and thus more maintainable code in Groovy, this is not enough let alone: of course you need some good practices to keep your code under control as your application keeps growing.…

Working with Groovy and Grails often gives you the feeling that things are magic and when you dive in, you realize that things are more complex than expected. At the same time, you often realize that a reasonable default behavior has been chosen by Groovy/Grails framework: What about transactions' magic in Grails? For me it was hard to believe so let's try to understand a little more how things work.