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That is as defined in my beloved and trusted Mac Dictionary. I have to do a little Java project soon. Not because I want to, because I HAVE to for Afrigator. Don’t get me wrong, I think Java is great and powerful. I have a healthy dose of respect for it. Problem is, I’ve never done anything remotely formal in Java. The only experience I have with it was when I checked it out about 6 years ago. Safe to say, I’m a n00b.

The problem is that I’m quite busy these days. Time and energy is not much for attempting learning a mammoth like Java.

Hello, Groovy! Groovy is a dynamic language specifically for the Java platform. Groovy is built for the JVM, making it easy for Java to integrate with Groovy vice versa. In Netbeans, they went a far as not even having an option to create a Groovy project. You create a normal Java project and then add Groovy classes to it. That is how tightly it seems integrated, which is good news for a n00b like me :)

The syntax itself seems very close to that of Ruby. Lets look at these examples (from the excellent article by Gerald Bauer – Groooooovy Babe: Jazzing Up Plain Old Java)

Here is some Java code

import java.util.*;

public class HelloWorld
{
  public static void main( String args[] )
  {
     List country = new ArrayList();
     country.add( "Canada" );
     country.add( "Austria" );
     country.add( "Brazil" );

     Collections.sort( country );

     for( Iterator it = country.iterator(); it.hasNext() )
        System.out.println( "Hello " + it.next() );
  }
}

The same in Groovy ( note the code reduction compared to Java :) )

country = [ 'Canada', 'Austria', 'Brazil' ]
country.sort
country.each { println "Hello ${it}" }

And in Ruby

country = [ 'Canada', 'Austria', 'Brazil' ]
country.sort
country.each { |country| puts "Hello #{country}" }

To top it all off, they even have their own Rails-like web framework called Grails (Groovy on Rails). I’ll check that out in due time.

All in all, Groovy feels much more comfortable and familiar to me. I’m looking forward to this little challenge and will probably write about it as I go along. Aslam Khan assured me that it is solid and he even have some Groovy code out there in the wild in production which is comforting! That and knowing someone who is an expert to ask for advice when the going gets rough, since I’m fairly sure it will get rough due to n00bn3ss!

Today I came across Fabric, which is a Python version of Capistrano. Now, for the record, my use of Capistrano has been limited. I use it for what I need it. Nothing more. What I’m trying to say is I didn’t go into a very advanced setup of Capistrano, so I’m not really qualified to say which is better. On the Fabric page it says:

It is a bit like a dumbed down Capistrano, except it’s in Python

I like it. Its simple and it is easier than Capistrano IMHO. In the end, it comes down to which tool suits you best! Capistrano does support commits and rollbacks which, by the looks of it, Fabric don’t.

Setting up Capistrano was painless. All I had to do was

sudo gem install capistrano

Fabric had a few dependency issues, which I had to meet first before I could

sudo easy_install Fabric

It was looking for pycrypto which I had to install before I could setup Fabric.

Once installed, using it is as straight forward as Capistrano. All you need to do is to create a fabfile which is a simple python file which holds all the config options and commands to execute remotely. The syntax is plain and simple and clean. Here is a simple example executing a directory listing on a remote server:

def listing():
    "Outputs a directory listing on the remote server."
    set(fab_user = 'stii')
    set(fab_hosts = ['stii.co.za'])
    run('ls -l /usr/bin')

Simple. Apart from the run command to execute remote queries, there are also a sudo (execute remote commands as a privileged user), local (execute commands on your local machine) and put (upload files to the remote servers) which is very handy.

I’m going to use it a bit more and would give you more feedback in a while. If you want, you can check it out!

Update: Here is an example of how to upgrade WordPress using Python Fabric