James Williams' Blog

It seems that Google has been busy adding new options and features to their chart API. Among the new features are map, spark lines, and expanded options for attributes like range markers. It was about time the Grails plugin got an update as well.

Because the plugin for the most part just takes in ArrayList to specify attributes, you only need to upgrade iff you want to use spark line charts, maps, or scaling of text encoded datasets. No upgrade is need to use the new range markers, solid attributes, or line styles.

The one thing that is missing at this time is the ability to do Radar charts. I plan to add that sometime soon.

A couple of weeks ago, I started a new and exciting job which hopefully explains my brief hiatus. I’m working with GIS and mapping technology and get to use Groovy and a bunch of other languages and cool APIs.

With JavaOne less than two months away, we’ve[the Java community] entered what I’d like to call a ’pseudo-hibernation’ period, where everyone is showing just enough signs of life to not hemorrhage traffic and readership but holding back enough to make a big splash at JavaOne. I can neither confirm or deny that if have something brewing or now...honestly, I don’t even know yet.

So... there...I’m not dead.

Due to the library and memory requirements of my blog, I had to leave eatj.com this month for greener pastures. The 64MB limit their shared hosting plan provides (undocumented until you go over) is very hard to abide by even with the most basic app. This past month I had to purchase an additional BASIC plan to account for the peaks. It was nice while it lasted but it’s about time to move on. So I have to remove my recommendation for eatj.com as a production Grails hosting. 

I’ve since moved to VPSLink.

hAvatar is a plugin for WordPress that displays avatars/photos for commenters based on the hCards contained in the URL they leave behind.

Given my recent fascination with microformats, it seemed like a cool thing to port to my blog.

When a comment is submitted, the commenter’s URL is parsed by hCardParser. If that hCard has a photo url, it returns it, otherwise it returns a link to a static no photo picture.

Additionally, there is a hAvatar discovery service(actually a quartz job) that iterates over the comments without a photo url and tries to parse the url for a hCard every six hours, if an url is present. This way, as more and more folks add hCards, the comments list will be get populated.

Given that it’s impossible to predict what information people will want to display, I haven’t published this as a plugin. Though I am only interested in a profile photo, others might want to retrieve a company name, nicknames, location or some other information the hCard creator provides. Or maybe they’d like to build a simplified hCard for their users.The hCardBuilder class and helper classes have been included in addition to hCard.

Entries with avatar images are here and here
Updated hCardBuilder
PhotoCheckerJob.groovy
hAvatar plugin for Wordpress
Online hCard Creator

** LinkedIn embeds hCard so if you have a photo in your profile, you're all set. **