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Archive for August, 2011

News Roundup: Gaelyk CRUD, Betamax, GPars Performance, Vsnap

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

New Gaelyk plugin: Easy Datastore Service Plugin — CRUD for Gaelyk

Vladimír Oraný has released a new plugin for Gaelyk — the Easy Datastore Service (EasyDS) Plugin, which “simplifies basic CRUD operation with entities and also provides some closure based valiation.” This is as far as I know the first attempt at adding such simplified, Grails-style CRUD to Gaelyk (and the plugin is in fact inspired by GORM). The source is up at GitHub, and there are code examples and explanations in the README.

GPars Performance Test

Results from a performance test of GPars (which was being used in building a REST interface) by Eric Sword.

Betamax: Groovy record/playback proxy for testing HTTP interactions

Betamax is a Groovy-based tool for recording and playing back HTTP traffic from an application (Rob Fletcher, its creator, refers to it as “basically a Groovy version of Ruby’s VCR”). As in VCR, recorded interactions are stored as YAML files; they can be hand-edited (and created!) if necessary and  even committed to version control. As it is with many Groovy projects these days, its source is on GitHub, and Mr. Fletcher is seeking feedback. See the README for more.

Database Migration In Grails

Nirav Assar covers the use of the Grails Database Migration plugin (based on Liquibase).

Vsnap: a new video messaging service, hiring senior Grails developer

Vsnap is a new service leading what is called the “video messaging revolution”: it allows users to “send, request, tag, and store 60 second video messages” with attachments. The site and the service are both still coming together, and as part of this they are looking for a senior Grails developer in the Boston area. See the blog post for more details.

Plugin releases

Grails GORM Native Finders Plugin — 0.1: query domain objects using native Groovy closures

Grails SimpleDB Plugin — 0.1: provide GORM API for the AWS SimpleDB datastore

Grails Compass CSS Plugin — 0.2.6: add support for Compass, SASS, and SCSS

Grails Google Visualization API Plugin — 0.4.1: provide taglib for interactive charts from the Google Visualization API

Grails Ajax Uploader Plugin — 0.4: provide a “highly configurable, cross-browser, ajax-based file uploader”

Grails External Configuration Reload Plugin — 0.3: reload external configuration files (uses a Quartz job)

Posted in groovy, news | 1 Comment »

News Roundup: groovy-wslite, Grails DB Migrations, Grails Project Stats

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011

groovy-wslite: Groovy library providing “no-frills SOAP and REST webservice clients”

This has been around for some time, but was just brought to my attention by Bob Brown at transentia: groovy-wslite, a Groovy web service library by John Wagenleitner. There are fine examples of both SOAP and REST clients in the project’s README on GitHub.

Countdown To Grails 2.0: Database Migrations

Peter Ledbrook is back at the SpringSource blog continuing his series on the new features coming in Grails 2.0. This time, it is a feature we can use in the current stable version (1.3.x): database migration, which is based on the plugin by Burt Beckwith. (The plugin, in turn, is based on Liquibase.)

I Think I Get Spock Mocks Now

Ken Kousen points out a misunderstanding regarding the mocking in Groovy’s Spock framework.

Our Grails Stats: But What Are Yours?

Erik Pragt at Jworks has posted the stats (derived from a modified version of  the Grails stats script) from a Grails project which his team has been working on “for over a year now, with, on average, around 8 people including testers.” He’s looking for others to contribute their project stats (and there are some interesting ideas for hacking Stats.groovy in the comments).

A Quick Intro To Gradle

R.J. Salicco at thejavajar gives a very quick introduction to Gradle, the Groovy build tool.

Plugin releases

Grails Inviter Plugin — 0.1: a simple way to invite people

Grails Spring Security SAML Plugin — 1.0.0 M1: SAML 2.x support for the Spring Security Plugin

Netbeans Griffon Plugin — updated for Netbeans 7.0.1

Posted in grails, griffon, groovy, news | No Comments »

News Roundup: CodeNarc-Eclipse, Discobot, GroovyHelp, Griffon

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

CodeNarc-Eclipse: Eclipse integration for CodeNarc

Yesterday, René Scheibe announced the first version of the Eclipse plugin for CodeNarc, Groovy’s static analysis tool. You can see the project on SourceForge.net.

These two weeks in Discobot

Erik Pragt has put up another update on Discobot, the ongoing project whose end is to get Groovy running on Android. The Jworks folks are building both developer tools for this and a demo Groovy project, which they have been successfully installing on the Android emulator. See the post for the project’s current status.

GroovyHelp 3.1.0 GA released

Daniel Sun has released GroovyHelp 3.1.0 GA. GroovyHelp is a Java API viewer for Windows, Linux, and OS X. This release includes, as I suspect is usual, performance improvements, among other changes. If you have any issues or suggestions, you can post them at the Google Code site.

Griffon 0.9.3 released

The Griffon team has announced their 0.9.3 release. In this release, Groovy support is upgraded to 1.8, and Java support is “fully revamped.” Andres Almiray has posted the 0.9.3 New & Noteworthy on his blog; to quote directly: “Looking at the runtime enhancements, there’s been a lot of work to make the size of the runtime library as small as possible. Griffon 0.9.3 is approximately 25% smaller and it even includes new features!” Get a fine summary of many new features and improvements from the blog post. There are full release notes at the CodeHaus.

Plugin releases

Grails Shiro User Interface Plugin — 1.0 beta3: provide a basic user interface for the Shiro plugin

Grails Uploadr Plugin — 0.4.2: HTML 5 drag-and-drop file uploading

Grails YUI Minify Plugin — 0.1: minify static CSS and JS resources using the YUI Compressor library

Grails BIRT Report Plugin — 3.7.0.0: embed BIRT Report Engine reports in a Grails application

Grails Browser Detection Plugin — 0.2: provide service and tag library for browser detection

Grails Drools GORM Plugin — 0.5.2: integrate Drools 5.2 and jBPM 5 with Grails

Grails Growler Plugin — 0.2: use jQuery’s jGrowl plugin to allow Growl-like notifications from remote function calls

Grails jQuery File Upload Plugin — 0.2: provide resources and tags for Sebastian Tschan’s jQuery File Uploader

Grails ZK UI Plugin — 0.3.1: integrate the ZK framework with Grails, using Grails infrastructure

Grails TinyMCE Plugin — 3.4.4: integrate TinyMCE JavaScript WYSIWYG editor with Grails

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News Roundup: Gaelyk 1.0, Bloogaey, GroovyServ, Grails vs. Rails, CodeNarc

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Gaelyk 1.0 released

This week, Guillaume Laforge, the Groovy project manager, announced the final release of Gaelyk 1.0. The big feature here is the Query DSL. Gaelyk users have been missing this for some time; to get an idea of the coolness and awesomeness and just sheer groovy brevity that is now possible with GAE datastore querying, see the “Google App Engine specific shortcuts” section of the tutorial (scroll down to “Querying”). The conversation in the announcement thread contains helpful bits and pieces and is worth skimming.

bloogaey, the new Gaelyk sample app: a blog engine

In time for Gaelyk’s 1.0 release, Guillaume Laforge has also posted the source for the new Gaelyk sample app, bloogaey — a blog engine written in Gaelyk to run on the Google App Engine. The goal is to have “a real app rather than just a mere small sample,” and bloogaey is a real blogging app, in the sense that it has post categories, a WYSIWYG editor for posts, image storing via the GAE blobstore, a social media harvesting apparatus, Atom feeds, comments (from IntenseDebate), Google Custom Search, and a deal more. All of this is on GitHub and accepting pull requests. (Guillaume has moved his blog to a deployment of bloogaey: visit glaforge.appspot.com to see it in action.)

GroovyServ 0.9 released

Yasuharu Nakano has released version 0.9 of GroovyServ. GroovyServ now has a Gradle build (the pom.xml for Maven is still included, “but maybe it will be removed at next version”), and there have been performance improvements. (René Groeschke has also updated MacPorts support for GroovyServ to this latest version.) See the changelog for the complete list of bug fixes and improvements.

“Should I use Grails?”

This week, Scott Eisenberg started an interesting discussion on the grails-user mailing list: “Should I use Grails?” Context is important here: The question comes down to whether Grails is mature enough to be used in a project given scaling, official support, and the number of available developers as concerns, and here Grails is specifically put in contrast to Rails. Many smart people have given in many wise opinions; in the opinion of yours truly, Nick Vaidyanathan’s is the unquestionably correct answer: “Should you? Definitely Maybe.”

CodeNarc 0.15 released

The CodeNarc team has released their version 0.15, with 23 new rules (the total is now 264) “and a bunch of bug fixes and enhancements.” (The bug fixes range from those correcting support of Groovy 1.8 to those improving consistency in log messages by fixing typos.) The complete list of changes is included in the announcement, and you can try out this release on the CodeNarc web console, which runs on the Google App Engine.

Plugin releases

Grails Redis Plugin — 1.0.0 M7: provide integration with Redis datastore

Grails Spring Social Core Plugin — 0.1.2: allow OAuth authentication though such services as Facebook and Twitter using the Spring Social library

Grails Spring Social Twitter Plugin — 0.1.3: allow authentication in Grails app through Twitter (depends on Spring Social Core Plugin)

Grails jQuery UI Widgets Plugin — 0.1.2: use jQuery UI by means of Grails tag libraries

Grails MessagePack Plugin — 0.1.1: expose Grails service classes through MessagePack

Grails Domain Schemagen Plugin — 1.0: output XML schema representation of Grails app’s domain

Grails Ant Plugin — 0.1.3: make Ant jars available to Grails app at runtime

Posted in announcement, grails, groovy, news | No Comments »

News Roundup: Grails 2.0 M1, Linked Ratpack, CodeNarc

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

Grails 2.0 M1 released

This week, the Grails development team released the first milestone of Grails 2.0. There is “brand new console ouput,” a very nice interactive mode, new test and documentation templates, Groovy 1.8, the ability to declare controller actions as methods, HTML5 scaffolding, and a great many other things added in this release. There are “release notes” (more a list of helpful links) at grails.org, and there is a good section (appropriately titled “What’s new in Grails 2.0?”) on these additions in the docs.

Linked Ratpack: a new linked data microframework

Al Baker at Linked Java has announced Linked Ratpack: a microframework for linked data. The code is based on a fork of Ratpack, and is available on GitHub. See the blog post for a good introduction.

Groovy CodeNarc: How To Write A Rule

Hamlet D’Arcy has posted a new screencast on groovycasts.org — “Groovy CodeNarc: How To Write A Rule.”

Plugin  releases

Grails Spring Security Twitter Plugin — 0.3: extends the Spring Security Core plugin, adding Twitter authentication

Prototype Grails Plugin — 1.0: integrates Prototype, Scriptaculous, and Rico JavaScript libraries with Grails

Grails Notifications Plugin — 0.2.4: implement publish/subscribe model to push information to subscribers through different communication channels

Grails Plugin Config Plugin — 0.1.3: simplify plugin configuration tasks

Grails GSP Content Buffer Plugin — 1.0: provide taglib method used to insert page fragments anywhere in a GSP before rendering

Grails Resources Plugin — 1.0.2: resource management framework

Grails Release Plugin — 1.0.0 RC3: publish Grails plugins to public or private repositories

Posted in groovymag | 1 Comment »