Cantina Consulting

Please join me in welcoming Chris Lamothe, the newest partner at Cantina Consulting, as a User Experience Principal.
Chris brings nearly 10 years of experience in a variety of aspects of user-centric design and interactive development, with specific areas of focus in e-learning and Rich Internet Application (RIA) design and development.
Both Matt and I have worked [...]

I’ve been working on a bit of code to perform audio and video encoding for media files uploaded to one of our client’s sites and I was thrilled to come across BackgrounDRb, a Rails plugin that allows developers to build scheduled background tasks, similar to the OpenSympony’s Quartz for Java. The plugin also allows you [...]

There’s been a bit of radio silence on our blog lately, and it’s for good reason!  We’ve been busy on several Rails and Grails-based projects lately which is why we’re very excited about the releases of both Rails 2.0.x and the first full 1.0 release of the Grails framework. 
The Grails release in particular is significant [...]

We’ve got a small internal project at Cantina that aims to make use of the Groovy on Grails framework and some of our Grails plugins, and we plan on using S3 as the persistent storage for the project.  We decided to test out a small EC2 instance at Amazon to use as an integration point [...]

Graeme and the Grails community have been hard at work lately getting Grails ready for a 1.0 release, and the latest release candidate, RC2 is quite indicative of their labors.  There are some impressive additions to this release, including a initial pass at a full set of reference documentation, Spring 2.5, and over 140 bug [...]

We’ve released our first ever plugin for the Groovy on Grails web application framework!  You can see the details over on our new Grails Plugins page. 
In short, we wanted to build something that would manage static file assets such as images, movies, audio, Flash, and perhaps down the road, site backups, on the Amazon Simple [...]

First let me congratulate all the folks that have been going crazy getting the Groovy on Grails (grails.org) framework to version 1.0 (almost there!). Just when I think my 0.5.6 version is going to be around for a while, they start releasing more versions, with a fury.
We’ve used Java here at Cantina on innumerable [...]

Greetings and salutations to all, and welcome to the very first blog post at Cantina.
First things are always first, and in the spirit of blogging as a new form of journalism (not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Journalism) let’s get the main questions that any reporter would ask out of the way:
Who
We’re a new boutique internet technology shop specializing in [...]