I recently ran into a case where I was violating the DRY principle by having to encode part of a string every time I added to it. After some digging I found the solution: Groovy Categories.

A bit of Groovy background

A couple key features of Groovy are that everything is an object and that operators are just syntactic sugar for calling methods on the objects. What’s cool about this is that with Groovy you can override the default behavior of these operators for certain classes. For example, 4 + 2 in Groovy really means 4.plus(2)

How to implement/override operators in Groovy

Groovy allows you to override a LOT of stuff, including final methods and operators. If I want to override a method on the String class, all I need to do is:
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I’ve written a guest post titled Improve your YSlow grade using htaccess over at the David Walsh Blog.

In it, I explain a bit about how browser caching works, how setting headers can affect caching and what you can use in your .htaccess file (or Apache httpd.conf) to maximize it.

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A few days ago I got my first Python project. I’d like to share references I’ve found, and what I like or dislike about the language. I hope to give insight to would-be Python dabblers and ideas to current Pythoneers.

Good resources I’ve found

I have found some good resources online for Python and Jython, but I know I didn’t find them all so if you Python-istas could put some in the comments I’d be very grateful :)

• The somewhat famous Python is not Java article
• Python Documentation Index
• Python 2.6.1 Docs
• Python Language Notes by Chris Rathman
• The Jython Project

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