Here’s a look at the space immediately behind my cup of redbush:

Core Technologies: Groovy and Grails!

Grails is a modern open source full-stack web application framework for the Java platform.
It employs a DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and ‘convention over configuration’ approach to reduce complexity; very quickly allowing you to get on with iterative agile development.

Furthermore, it allows you to take advantage of the following best-of-breed technologies without necessarilly needing to be an expert in them:
Spring, Hibernate (Object Relational Mapping), SiteMesh (view templating/decoration), jUnit (testing), log4j (logging), etc.  The Groovy programming language is used, though you can always mix in Java, because it integrates seamlessly.

Grails comes with support for unit, integration and functional (via. the G-Func plugin) tests.

Development Tools: IntelliJ IDEA, Firebug, Poster.

I use Jetbrain’s IntelliJ IDEA IDE for Grails development on the Ubuntu linux distribution.
Along with good language and framework support it eases code management through a SVN plugin and a fully integrated and interactive visual diff tool; check this out:

There are plugins to do everything save launch spaceprobes!

Also essential on a daily basis are Firefox’s Firebug and Poster add-ons.

Quake Guake

During the course of the project I have become heavily dependent on using a Quake-style drop-down terminal for GNOME called guake.  It’s main benefit is that it can toggled on and off through a key combo – simple eh?  I now never have to hunt around for multi-tabbed terminal windows.

Twitter

Many of the posts in this blog were fed in from tweets, TweetDeck and gwibber are the clients that I gravitated to.

jQuery

I have adopted  jQuery as my JavaScript library of choice.  It’s lightweight, fast and fosters the  separation of a site’s  behaviour cleanly into a separate layer.  Furthermore, it eases the development skinnable user interfaces via. jQuery UI.

REST

Our API tries to implement ideas from the RESTful approach to web services in it’s reliance of HTTP methods, status codes, and resources.  The book ‘RESTful Web Services‘ by Richardson and Ruby is an essential read.