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Groovy and Grails adoption holdups?

March 7th, 2010

What are some issues holding up Groovy and Grails adoption that you’ve encountered?  The biggest I see have less to do with the technologies itself and more about the marketplace.  Specifically, issues about finding developers familiar with the technology in the first place seem to be a major issue affecting a company’s confidence in adopting Groovy or Grails for a project.  This seems very much a chicken/egg situation – where will people get the experience using it if it’s not used, right?

Fortunately, I’ve personally been able to see some Grails and Groovy projects launch over the last year, helping to bring the numbers of experienced developers up, if only by a small amount, but I’d like to hear about more success stories.  Matt Woodward’s piece in the March 2010 issue is encouraging as well, because it may help prod developers from other camps (ColdFusion in his case, PHP in mine) to come in to the Grails camp, expanding the total pie.  While it’s great to get Java developers to use Grails as their primary web framework, we’re only growing Grails at the expense of other frameworks, and that does nothing to enlarge the share of the JVM as a web platform.

I see commodity hosting as a longstanding (but hopefully not eternal) stumbling block in the Java world, and keep hoping someone will address this with an offer targeting Grails.  Ideally a customized hosting solution with the breadth of plesk or webmin with custom management for Grails apps.

Maybe I’m too much a stick-in-the-mud, and not with the current ‘cloud’ bandwagon.  Perhaps everyone is content with Google App Engine, but I don’t see those sorts of solutions (AWS, etc) as providing much beyond mechanical plumbing.  There seem to be issues with SSL support for GAE as well, so it’s not something suitable for a majority of security-minded apps.

What’s your view on the state of the Groovosphere?

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GroovyMag March 2010 Now Available

March 5th, 2010

In this issue

Griffon Plugins

Andres Almiray digs in to the Griffon Plugin architecture

Magic Numbers

Bjoern Wilmsmann takes us behind the scenes of his Magic Numbers plugin to walk you through adding magic runtime functionality to basic numbers

Ivy DSL

Henryk Konsek demonstrates the power of using Ivy in Grails 1.2

Grails for Switchers

Switching to Grails from a non-Java background? Matt Woodward gives you the dos and don’ts from someone who’s been there

Easy E-Commerce with Grails – Part 2

Matt Stine wraps up his look at setting up an e-commerce site with Grails.

Monthly Columns

Groovy Under the Hood – Groovy Maps Part 1

This month, Kirsten Schwark covers Groovy’s maps.

Community news

Catch up with the latest Groovy and Grails news with Dave Klein.

Plugin Corner

Dave Klein covers the ‘Email Confirmation’ plugin.

Page count: 40

Learn more or purchase today!

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GroovyMag February 2010 now available

February 9th, 2010

Catching up with Griffon

Craig Wickesser has some one-on-one time with Andres Almiray.

Gambling on Griffon and Grails Groing Gangbusters

Take a spin with Bob Brown as he demonstrates Griffon on the front and Grails on the back.

Groovy In the Wild

Steve Dalton has a chat with Rob Fletcher of Sky.com

Easy E-Commerce with Grails

Matt Stine takes you through the basics of setting up an e-commerce site with Grails.

Monthly Columns

Groovy Under the Hood – Boolean

This month, Kirsten Schwark covers Groovy’s booleanity.

Community news

Catch up with the latest Groovy and Grails news with Dave Klein.

Plugin Corner

Dave Klein covers the ‘Tag Cloud’ plugin.

Page count: 36

Learn more or purchase today!

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Interesting project – easygsp

January 19th, 2010

I just stumbled on easygsp, which aims to bring Groovy/GSP to more people by taking the dependance of a Java app server out of the equation.  I would like to take a closer look at this in the next week or two, but if anyone has any experiences with this so far, please share them with me.  groovy-lamp looks like another similar project, but I may be confusing the goals of each.

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Grails Spy Plugin released

January 8th, 2010

This looks pretty slick:

http://blog.jetztgrad.net/2010/01/released-grails-spy-plugin/

This isn’t at all related to the p6spy plugin, which allows you to monitor db calls in Grails.  Rather, this allows you to inspect all the dynamic beans that are created at runtime in Grails.

You can grab the source from github, but take a look at the link above to see what sort of cool goodness you get with this plugin.

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January 2010 GroovyMag now available

January 7th, 2010

Groovy Combinator Parsers

Ken Barclay demonstrates building a lexical parser with Groovy.

Groovy MetaObject Programming – Part 2

Craig Wickesser continues his exploration of the dark arts of metaobject programming.

Groovy Around the Globe – UK

Steve Dalton continues his look at the Groovy community around the world, this time looking at the United Kingdom.

Book Excerpt – Griffon in Action

Check out a section of the upcoming “Griffon in Action” book (Manning) by Andres Almiray, Danno Ferrin and Geertjan Wielenga.

Monthly Columns

Groovy Under the Hood – Groovy Lists

This month, Kirsten Schwark covers Groovy’s lists functionality.

Community news

Catch up with the latest Groovy and Grails news with Dave Klein.

Plugin Corner

Dave Klein covers the ‘Google Chart’ plugin.

Page count: 44

Learn more or purchase today!

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Groovy benchmarked against JRuby, Rhino and Jython

December 29th, 2009

Tiago Fernandez has a nice writeup on a benchmark he did between Groovy, JRuby, Rhino and Jython.  The verdict is generally a tie between JRuby and Rhino, with Groovy generally a second or third and Jython looking to be in last place on all 4 benchmarks.  Personally, I would have liked to see Groovy 1.7 benchmarked instead of 1.6.7.  Tiago acknowledges this discrepancy but points out that the 1.7 release notes don’t make any mention of significant speed improvements for 1.7.  Here’s hoping that’ll change in the coming months, and the Groovy 1.8 (or 2.0?) will one day be the fastest around.  :)

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Grails and OAuth example from Matt Raible

December 28th, 2009

Matt Raible has a nice write up on his blog about using Grails (1.2!) with his forked version of Grails-OAuth plugin and LinkedIn’s API.   His live example is here (letting you log in with LinkedIn credentials or Twitter credentials), and the OAuth plugin can be downloaded from here.

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New GR8 releases

December 27th, 2009

We’ve been fortunate to have two new releases in Groovy world recently – Groovy 1.7 and Grails 1.2. I presume many/most of you already knew about these, but in case you didn’t, now you know. :)  Thanks Groovy and Grails teams for your continued gr8 work!

I’m personally looking forward to the ‘named query’ support in Grails 1.2 (I’ve got a Grails 1.1 project I’ll be upgrading and refactoring soon!) and the improved memory usage in Grails 1.2 will be welcome as well.

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December 2009 GroovyMag now available

December 7th, 2009

Using JNDI in Grails Applications

Join Damien Ferrand as he takes a closer look at JNDI and what it can do for your Grails architecting.

Groovy Metaprogramming

Craig Wickesser delves in to the black art of metaobject programming and demonstrates just how powerful Groovy can be.

Building a Grails Portal Part III

Joshua Davis wraps up his series on building a web portal with Grails.

Interview with Sven and Glen Part I

Damien sits down (virtually) with the hosts of the popular Grails Podcast for their insights on the GR8 community.

Groovy Under the Hood

This month, Kirsten Schwark covers Groovy’s collections functionality.

Community News

Catch up with the latest Groovy and Grails news with Dave Klein.

Plugin Corner

Dave Klein covers the ‘Constraints’ plugin.

Learn more or purchase today!

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