Just a quick ‘hello’ to GroovyMag readers and followers to wish them a Happy Thanksgiving day today! For those of you not based in the US, I all hope you enjoy your day all the same! Sympathies go out to those in Mumbai affected by the attacks yesterday, and that news makes me all the more appreciative of the family and friends I have around me these days.

Thanks everyone for a great November so far. Couldn’t have expected this amount of support for a first month’s launch, and it’s
truly appreciated.

I wanted to give y’all a quick update on how we’re progressing, because I’ve had a number of questions from many of you on these issues.

Print copies

We’re still investigating print copies of the magazine. Some of you have indicated that you’re not interested in print, but many of you
have expressed a desire for print. As you can probably guess, print costs a lot extra to produce. Between the printing and
the shipping costs, that might add an extra $4 or $5 on to the cost, and we need to commit to a certain amount of printed
copies every month to get any sort of volume pricing. Print copies are something we’ll continue to look in to, but probably won’t
be a reality until GroovyMag is a few more months older (first quarter of next year, perhaps). But we are still looking for ways
to make this happen.

Subscriptions

We’re looking at ways to organize and manage a yearly subscription to GroovyMag. This may be in place for the January edition, so keep your eyes peeled for this.

Licensing

We’ve had multiple inquiries from companies interested in licensing GroovyMag for their engineering staff. This is being worked on as well, and I also
expect this to be in place for Q1 of next year, possibly for the January issue. If you’re interested in this, please email editor@groovymag.com
to discuss the details. Site licenses will be priced per reader, with group discounts available.

Thanks!

Again, thank you everyone for making the first month of GroovyMag, well… Groovy, and we’re looking forward to bringing you
more great Groovy and Grails content to help improve your skills.

I’m planning to do this on a couple other projects, and thought I’d share this with you. It’s not specifically something related to
GroovyMag magazine, but is a technique I’m using in a Grails project to make it easy to switch layouts based on the user.

All the default generated views use the meta tag ‘layout’ to point to a GSP file which will get merged with your view file (using
sitemesh) to generate the final rendered HTML. Unfortunately these are always hardcoded to ‘main’ rather than a configurable
option. So, I’ve taken to modifying the templates used during generation to point to a configuration value.

Run “grails install-templates” then look in src/templates/scaffolding. You’ll see the create/edit/list/show GSP files which are used as the basis for generation.

Edit the files such that the meta line

<meta name=”layout” content=”main” />

looks like this

<meta name=”layout” content=”\${session?.layout?:grailsApplication.config.sitemesh.layout}” />

Then edit your grails-app/conf/Config.groovy file to have a line that reads

sitemesh.layout = “main”

If you then generate views for an app, everything will continue to work as it normally does by default; specifically,
all the views will use the grails-app/views/layouts/main.gsp as a sitemesh wrapper for rendering.

However, you’re now able to set the layout to something different for each user by setting the session.layout value.

If a user has authenticated and is an administrator, perhaps you’d want to have

session.layout = “admin”

in a controller action, which would use the grails-app/views/layouts/admin.gsp file for rendering views for an admin.

If views for entire controllers require a different view, you should be able to set the global config value for all users by doing something like

grailsApplication.config.sitemesh.layout = “layout2″

in a controller action.

GroovyMag is running a survey to help learn more about you, the readers. Take the survey and enter
to win the upcoming December 2008 issue! The survey shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes to fill out, and your feedback
and input will help us make decision about what to focus on and how to improve the magazine for everyone.



We’ll draw five winners out of the survey respondents after November 28. Winners will be notified by email ( you need to enter your
email address at the bottom of the survey to enter ).



Take the survey today!

Many of you have probably already read about the announcement this morning from both SpringSource
and G2One (Guillaume and Graeme
go in to more detail on their respective blogs). What does this mean for Groovy and Grails?

In the short term, probably not actually all that much will change. Neither Graeme nor Guillaume have mentioned any
timetable changes for the next Groovy and Grails releases. I suspect that combining resources with SpringSource may help
with bug fixing and integration efforts in the immediate future.

Over the slightly longer term, this looks like it’ll bolster the training and consulting offerings from SpringSource to
address whatever dynamic language needs their customers had. G2One’s existing customers will now have access to Spring
experts.

The impact over the long haul is still an unknown, though it sounds like all parties involved have many ideas about
what they’ll be able to accomplish. We’ll just need to wait and see what the future holds for Groovy and Grails.

I had a few extra minutes today to play with iMovie, and put together a little promotional video for GroovyMag. Take a look.

The GroovyMag “Spread The Wealth” sale, celebrating the US election (celebrating that it’s finally over!), concluded today.



For 24 hours we offered GroovyMag at the bargain-basement price of $3.49, in honor of the 349 electoral votes received by
the winning presidential candidate, Barack Obama. We @ GroovyMag had rather hoped Obama might be 402 electoral votes
to ease the strain on the corporate coffers, but it is what it is.



Thank you to everyone who has purchased GroovyMag so far! Please send your feedback to editor@groovymag.com, or simply post a comment
here in the blog. We’d love to know what you like, what you don’t like, and what you’re looking to see in future issues!

To celebrate our US elections, GroovyMag will be $3.49 for November 5, 2008. Barack Obama won 349 electoral votes, and GroovyMag will be 349 cents ($3.49) to celebrate. And yes, if McCain had one, we’d have had the same sale. This isn’t political

Visit GroovyMag to pick up your copy today, November 5, 2008 for only $3.49!

If you’ve had problems receiving your PDF issue, please contact editor@groovymag.com and I’ll take care of it ASAP.



There’s been some intermittent problems from PayPal notifying our server of the payment. What ends up happening is that
you pay, they take your money, but never tell our server that you’ve paid, so you end up going back to your account and don’t see
your PDF. Not good!



The good news is that this is intermittent (not all of you have experienced this). The bad news is that this is intermittent (a few of you have experienced this).
PayPal is aware of the issue and is looking in to it. While I don’t expect any sort of immediate resolution, be aware that I’m aware of the issue.



If you write in, please forward a copy of your paypal receipt, and send me the email address you’re registered at with GroovyMag.com and it’ll be fixed quickly.



Also, a couple of you have had problems paying with American Express from outside the US. This seems to be a limitation of PayPal, GroovyMag’s current payment processor.
I’m currently investigatin some other options for next month, so please hang in there. If you’ve had a problem paying,
email editor@groovymag.com to let me know about it.



Thanks for your patience as we work through these growing pains!

I launched GroovyMag just a couple days ago and the response has been great so far! Thank you to everyone who has
expressed support, purchased a copy, or just wished the project well It’s all very much appreciated!



I’ll be using the blog to post items about what’s coming up in future issues, to ask questions of you (the Groovy community) and simply to get
feedback on how the magazine is doing.



Got a question? Post it here, or email editor@groovymag.com and I’ll get back to you ASAP.