Sebastian Grant

I don’t know how I do it. Last night I blew up yet another PS3.

Whilst waiting for Modern Warfare 2 and  Assassin’s Creed 2, I decided I’d get back to trophy hunting on Fallout 3 (because of the disappointing ending), so have been playing it daily for about a week. Yesterday I played a little at lunch time, then sporadically throughout the afternoon whilst waiting for work assets to arrive and left it on pause whilst cooking a lovely Spaghetti Bolognese for Soph.

I am pretty well known among my friends, family and peers as being quite selfish -self-absorbed maybe- and on the surface this is a fair approximation of my character. At this point in my life I feel that I need to be quite selfish to get myself to a point where I can effectively become the Thomas-and-Martha-Wayne-style philanthropist I aim to be; charity begins at home, as they say.

In short, I aim to change the world, but cannot do so until I have secured mine (and my family’s) own future.

It is pretty obvious that we all need to give serious consideration to our energy usage; whether it be to save the world or to save money; this is nothing new and what I am about to write will come as no surprise to most but will hopefully help others save themselves money and as an additional bonus, help towards saving the world.

In my last post I described why I love Grails Taglibs and how they increase productivity, reduce the amount of code in GSPs (therefore reducing maintenance time) and help to keep your code consistent; this post, as promised, is aimed at PHP developers moving over to Grails and will show newbies how to use Taglibs and reduce your coding time and re-used code.

When writing your application, you will quickly come across blocks of code that you will re-use – in fact, a good indicator of this is the over use of CMD-V (or Ctrl-V for those developers still using Windows) – these will be the first methods in your taglib.

We shall use the DVD Library from my last post to illustrate how I would begin and a couple of example methods within the taglib itself. Before we begin, I’ll quickly describe namespaces and what they mean for taglibs.