New Groovy releases
This past Wednesday, Guillaume Laforge announced the joint release of Groovy 1.7.9 with the second release candidate of Groovy 1.8. Both of these target bug fixes. The Groovy team expects RC2 to be the last release candidate of 1.8, with a final release coming “a couple of weeks from now.” They are actively awaiting audience participation with this RC, so download it and report away.
CodeNarc 0.13 released
The developers of CodeNarc, the static analysis tool for Groovy, have released version 0.13, with a corresponding update to the Grails CodeNarc plugin (0.10). This release adds 40 new rules (there are now 206 in all). There are improved error messages and a restyled HTML report, among other things. You can try out this latest release on the CodeNarc web console, at http://meetcodenarc.appspot.com/.
Getting Groovy On The Web And Desktop
Andres Almiray shows how to build a Griffon client for a Grails-powered bookstore.
“How many Grails developers globally?”
There’s been a lengthy thread on the grails-user mailing list this week, trying to answer this question. There aren’t yet any reliable means of estimating the total number of Grails users; there have been guesses – anywhere between 55,000 and 100,000 – but nothing upon which to base them. Download statistics are one way to get a rough estimate, but Grails’ download statistics only go back to last December, and they don’t count downloads from Maven Central. It appears that there won’t be actual data to go on until the Grails team brings Spring User Agent Analysis (UAA) into Grails 1.4.
Configure Grails embedded Tomcat instance for development
Roshan Dawrani tells how to adjust the configuration of Grails’ embedded Tomcat instance using the Tomcat plugin’s ConfigureTomcat event.
GContracts 1.2.0 released
Andre Steingress has posted an overview of the improvements made in version 1.2.0 of GContracts, “the AST transformation framework enabling programmers to use contracts (aka Design by Contract®) in Groovy.” This version adds (among many other things) support for Groovy interfaces and a separate domain model. There have been other changes: GContracts is now built with Gradle, and it has its very own Twitter account.
Better JDBC With Groovy SQL
Dustin Marx demonstrates some uses of Groovy’s Sql class.
Plugin releases
Grails CouchDB ElasticSearch Plugin – 0.1: integrate CouchDB with ElasticSearch
Grails Activiti Plugin – 5.3: use Activiti BPM Suite and workflow system with Grails. Release announcement, with links: http://limcheekin.blogspot.com/2011/03/grails-activiti-plugin-53-released.html
Grails Fitnesse Plugin – 0.5: use the open-source testing framework Fitnesse with Grails
Grails GateIn Plugin – 0.1: deploy Grails portlets to JBoss GateIN 3.1 Portal
Grails Mondrian Plugin – 0.3: integrate Mondrian, an open-source online analytical processing engine, with Grails
