Geb is a Groovy-based layer of magic over the top of Selenium/WebDriver for web-based automation tasks and is a tool worthy of being added to your programming tool belt. What’s So Special About Geb? Quoting from the Gebish.org site: It brings together the power of WebDriver, the elegance of jQuery content selection, the robustness of Page Object modelling and the expressiveness of the Groovy language. The simplicity and elegance of a typical script makes it very easy to get a basic task up an going within minutes, something we can demonstrate right now.

Recently I discovered a local site, westernrails.com, provides a weekly update on some train movements in the Perth / WA area, in the form of an e-mag / PDF. (I’m a bit of a train geek, but that’s a different post). Unfortunately the site doesn’t offer a feed so as a bit of an exercise I decided to write a little downloader script that would grab the whole list of back-issues.

I recently embarked on a little journey to investigate various methods to improve the performance of a website, in this case a small static placeholder site of mine (might as well put something there) dand.ws. It’s hosted on shared hosting at Dreamhost, on Apache. Why Does Performance Matter? Website performance is known to be one (of many) indicator that Google use to rank sites. This means that if you’re trying to run a business, poor performance is probably costing your money.

Groovy 2.0 has officially been released by Guillaume LaForge today, go get it Guillaume has also written a great intro to the new features over at Infoq here