During my off hours this week, I started playing around with spring-boot. This is one of those frameworks I've been meaning to learn and try out but haven't had the time until recently. My first impressions were fairly positive, though it can be tough to develop in with a simple editor like Sublime Text due to remembering the import statements for all those annotations.

One thing that caught me off guard was the limited support for serving static assets and dealing with compiling...

Finally, after over 6 months of work, we are ready to announce the new Asset-Pipeline plugin for the JVM. As many people already know, the Asset-Pipeline plugin started out as a Grails plugin to replace the aged resources plugin. The plugin provided on-the-fly compiling of assets during development (including transpiling coffeescript, LESS, SASS, Handlebars, and more) for easy debugging. It also provides a rock solid build phase for serving compiled assets in a clean packaged production war...

Writing plugins for your favorite framework, or language, can be a very enjoyable and rewarding experience. There are so many open source projects out in the world now. Wether you're writing plugins for Rails, Grails, or even PHP, there are tons of examples and guides on how to make them. But how do you make a plugin that everyone wants to use? How do you support your plugin without it consuming your time? How do you encourage outside contributors to aid in your endeavor? All of these are...