Programming Groovy is easy to start with. This reference of best practices and idiomatic solutions smoothly guides you to the next step of achieving more expressive solutions that fully leverage the power of the language. Simply looking up proven solutions for everyday tasks goes beyond general IDE support.

Suggested solutions range from working with standard data types like objects, strings, numbers, collections, ranges, and maps, through dealing with regular expressions, operators, closures, and meta-programming facilities up to library support for threading, external processes, I/0, networking, user interfaces, XML, and databases.

Among the dizzying number of Web frameworks available today, Wicket’s simple and intuitive approach to Web development has led it to become a favorite among many Java developers.  This Refcard brings you quickly up to speed on some of the key features of Apache Wicket 1.3, showing you how to configure the framework, define your domain model, create standard Wicket components and add internationalization options.

This DZone Refcard provides an introduction to Vaadin. Vaadin is a server-side Ajax web application development framework that allows you to build web applications just as you would with traditional desktop frameworks, such as AWT or Swing.

In this Refcard, updated for IntelliJ IDEA 8.1, Hamlet D’Arcy helps you navigate the various facets of the IDE, including the Editor, Project, and Structure panes.  With a rich collection of editing shortcuts, debugging tips and techniques for writing less code, IntelliJ newbies and IDEA-savvy developers will both benefit with this cheat sheet by their side.

If you are still using IntelliJ IDEA 6.0, don’t worry, our original IntelliJ IDEA Refcard is exactly what you need.

"This is a very good concept, and will be useful to people new to PowerShell." –Marco Shaw, MVP – Windows Server – Admin Frameworks

Windows PowerShell is a modern object-based command shell and scripting language designed for Microsoft Windows. Along with the normal shell features for working with files and programs, it also provides for direct access to all of Windows though the Windows Object Models: .NET, COM and WMI.

This refcard covers starting and using Windows PowerShell, including the syntax for all statements, operators and other elements of the language. Also included are examples of how to use .NET, COM, ADSI and WMI objects from PowerShell. Finally, it includes tips and tricks—short examples showing how to perform common tasks from PowerShell.

jQuery selectors are one of the most important aspects of the jQuery library. These selectors use familiar CSS syntax to allow page authors to quickly and easily identify any set of page elements to operate upon with the jQuery library methods. Understanding jQuery selectors is the key to using the jQuery library most effectively. This reference card puts the power of jQuery selectors at your very fingertips.

This DZone Refcard provides an in-depth introduction to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5. We take you all the way from installation to the deployment of your application.  A must have for both users starting out with Java EE as well as senior architects.

This refcard gives you an overview of key aspects of the Java language and cheat sheets on the core library (formatted output, collections, regular expressions, logging, properties) as well as the most commonly used tools (javac, java, jar).

Features include Java Keywords, Standard Java Packages, Character Escape Sequences, Collections and Common Algorithms, Regular Expressions, JAR Files and more.

Design patterns provide a fundamental foundation to building maintainable and scalable software. Understanding how the patterns work, why they provide a benefit, and when to use them helps to ensure that software is built from reusable object oriented components. This Refcard provides a quick reference to the original 23 Gang of Four design patterns, as listed in the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Each pattern includes class diagrams, explanation, usage information, and a real world example.

 

Enterprise software development is inherently complex.  Multi-user systems open the door to concerns such as transactional integrity, security, persistence integration, and interaction between components.  Simply put, the mission of the Java Enterprise Edition is to enable an out-of-the-box set of configurable services that allows the programmer to write less and focus on delivering clean business logic.  This week’s Refcard on Java EE 6 focuses on the very best parts of the public APIs with descriptions, code examples, and class names.

Chef is a new breed of open-source "infrastructure as code" tools to manage infrastructures of any size, including cloud infrastructures. It provides administrators and developers with the capability to define “cookbooks” that can be applied repeatedly and consistently to server and application configurations. After reading this refcard, you’ll be able to download and use Chef to easily create an elegant, fully automated infrastructure of any size.

 

The open source Liferay Portal is a popular technology for building enterprise websites and business applications. Vaadin, an open source web framework, allows you to build web apps with a process that is familiar to desktop developers. This Refcard gives a quick overview of the user interface development with Vaadin on Liferay and it covers topics like portlet setup, configuration, inter-portlet communication (IPC), UI composition, and theming. After reading this card, get an even better understanding of Liferay Portal and Vaadin framework by downloading "Liferay Essentials" and "Vaadin: A Familiar Way to Build Web Apps with Java".

Developers from the Java Development Kit team have worked closely with developers from the NetBeans team to create a well aligned JDK 7 development experience with support for new language features, such as the diamond operator, strings in switch, and multicatch. When you use these constructs in your code, NetBeans IDE recognizes them, offers correct classes in code completion, correctly highlights errors, and lets you automatically fix old syntax.  You’ll find this reference card helpful if you want to get as much out of JDK 7 and NetBeans IDE 7 as their creators intended.

Leveraging the Adobe AIR runtime, you can now develop mobile ActionScript and Flex applications for Google Android, Apple iOS, and BlackBerry Tablet OS with the same ease and quality as on desktop platforms, and with most of the same code!  This week’s Refcard will walk you through the easiest process yet for developing and deploying cross-platform applications on multiple devices and platforms.  Get acquainted with the new Flash Builder 4.5 Eclipse-based IDE for Flex mobile application development.

The DevOps movement, put simply, is a push from the software industry to have better interaction and productivity between developers, testers (QA), and Operations (IT). It espouses that each of these professionals should at least have a group of ambassadors with a multidisciplinary skill set. They should be comfortable with infrastructure as well as testing, debugging, and shipping features.
The DevOps Zone seeks to encourage these ambassadors and help them share ideas to make software production and IT more successful. Check out our new DevOps Zone to be part of this growing community and growing movement. All of the best content on DevOps-related topics can be found there. Contact us if you are an active blogger on DevOps topics.

 

 

This week’s Refcard covers some tools that are used by professional web developers to develop applications with slick, Flex UIs and powerful, battle-tested backends coded in PHP. Adobe’s new Eclipse-based IDE, Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP, was recently released and it was co-developed by Adobe and Zend Technologies. It’s one of the more interesting cross-platform integrations in a long time. Learn how to profit from this marriage of tools created by the leaders in the RIA and PHP development arenas.