This week in Discobot (40.2011)

After some hectic times at work caused by very tight deadlines and me getting married in the beginning of September we finally managed with Erik to get back to working on Discobot last week.

Some of you have probably already noticed that we have a talk on Discobot scheduled at Groovy & Grails Exchange 2011 in London which takes place in early December. Although the progress is good there is still quite a lot of work to be done on Discobot and we decided that probably one evening a week will not be enough. On the other hand knowing about the talk gives us an even stronger motivation to succeed!

Last week Erik continued his work on getting all Groovy tests running in the emulator. We found out that ‘on the fly generated’ classes which are created by Groovy when you for example cast a map of closure into a class using ‘as’ keyword cannot be loaded by the classloader. The reason is simple – classloader looks for class files but it should be looking for dex files. This is our main concern at the moment as it causes exceptions all over the place and breaks anything more complex than a ‘hello world’. From the code written by Hjalmar we’ve noticed that he also encountered the problem and we’re trying to apply his solution to see if it will work. So, it looks like there’s a lot of class loading fun ahead of us!

We’ve also got a response from guys behind Gradle plugin for Android about our pull request. They had several small remarks which I managed include in my second pull request. From what they said it looks like they should accept it in the coming days.

I’ve also looked for options regarding a repository in which to put our artefacts (Gradle plugin and the modyfied version of Groovy). I’ve found a nice blog about creating a a github based Maven repository and using it with Gradle. It seems easy and straightforward so probably we will go for this solution for now.