Author Archives: Derek Sisson

Setting an entity property as a list with Gaelyk and Google Appengine

As the Gaelyk site says, “Gaelyk is a lightweight Groovy toolkit for Google App Engine Java.”
Gaelyk makes it easier and Groovier to play with datastore entities, allowing the following syntax for creating and saving Entity:

import com.google.appengine.api.datastore.Entity

//create the entity
Entity student = new Entity(”person”)

//set and populate properties
student["name"] = “John Doe”
student["grade"] = “8″

student.save()

What you can’t do with this [...]

Canoo Webtest, Groovy, and Maintaining Session with Tests

The open source Canoo Webtest is a powerful tool for automating functional and regression tests for your web application. You can script your test steps in XML or in Groovy (or a mix of both), and you can build a comprehensive library of test steps that you combine and reorder into your tests.
The documentation for [...]

The Straw Man as Web Design Process Motivator

A “straw man” in the most general sense is a sneaky kind of rhetorical argument based on misrepresenting an opponent’s argument [1]. In the design world, on the other-hand, a “straw man” is an artefact of some kind — like a page design, flow chart, storyboard, etc. — intended to initiate discussion.
According to [...]

Pardon the Dust While We Remodel

I’m in the process of revamping philosophe.com, which entails:

converting the old hand-coded html content into WordPress content
mapping the 20-year-old urls to the new ones
updating these woefully old essays
publishing new essays

Thanks for your patience, and sorry for the inconvenience.