As I recently joined Google’s developer advocacy team for Google Cloud Platform, I thought I could have a little bit of fun with combining my passion for Apache Groovy with some cool cloudy stuff from Google! Incidentally, Paolo Di Tommaso tweeted about his own experiments with using Groovy with Apache Spark, and shared his code on Github: I thought that would be a nice fun first little project to try to use Groovy to run a Spark job on Google Cloud Dataproc! Read more...

The cat is out the bag: I’m joining Google on June 6th, as a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform team! My Groovy friends will likely remember when I launched Gaelyk, a lightweight toolkit for developing Groovy apps on Google App Engine? Since then, I’ve always been a big fan of the Google Cloud Platform (although it wasn’t called that way then) and followed the latest developments of the whole platform. Read more...

Along with the release of Gaelyk 1.2, I’d like to share two interesting links about running functional tests with Geb, and concurrency / parallelism with GPars on Gaelyk. Gaelyk functional testing with Geb In the Groovy ecosystem, we’re all aware of the Spock testing framework. On top of Spock, you can use the Geb browser automation library, to easily create functional tests for your web applications, in a nice, readable and expressive fashion. Read more...

In a recent article, I was complaining about the new Google App Engine pricing policy. Obviously, as I have a few applications deployed on App Engine, and as I’m developing Gaelyk, a lightweight toolkit for this platform, I was worried about being heavily affected by those changes. In this article, I’d like to do a short summary of my experience so far. I have close to 10 applications deployed on Google App Engine. Read more...

I’m quite disappointed by Google App Engine’s new pricing model. I was aware of the changes, the upcoming prices and quotas, but I wasn’t expecting my small low-trafic apps to go beyond the free quotas, and force me to have to pay for those small Gaelyk apps! The big problem is the cost of the “frontend instance hours”. An app running all the time, with low trafic, but enough to keep a frontend instance running all day will cost you 30 bucks a month with this new pricing policy. Read more...