These weeks in Discobot

From the JWORKS blog: Erik Pragt and Marcin Erdmann are busily “working on getting Groovy to run on Android and make the process as smooth as possible for other developers.” They have started what I believe is a weekly series to document their progress on this project (Discobot), and there are two posts up so far (26.2011, 27-28.2011).

Command-Line Dictionary Using Groovy WS

Steve at Revert To Console builds a Groovy client for DictService.

Groovy++ survey

Alex Tkachman, creator of Groovy++, has put together a new survey for Java and Groovy developers, and plans to publish the results next week. If you have not taken it yet, allow me to ask exactly why you haven’t. If you have, then you may as well take it again, because this is a new one. It is right here at SurveyMonkey.

Plugin releases

Grails Image-Tools Plugin — 0.1: encapsulate JAI calls for operations such as image loading, saving, cropping, masking and thumbnail creation

Grails gChimp Plugin — 0.2.6: an interface for the MailChimp 1.2 API

Grails Jesque Plugin — 0.1: a groovier approach to using Jesque

Grails Rollback On Exception Plugin — 0.1: initiate rollback on any exception in a Grails service marked as transactional

Grails Cloud Foundry Plugin — 1.0.1: integrate Cloud Foundry‘s cloud deployment services to manage the running of Grails applications in the cloud from the command line

Grails Cloud Foundry UI Plugin — 1.0.1: provide a basic monitoring UI for Cloud Foundry applications

Grails Custom Constraints Plugin — 0.6.0: create custom domain constraints for validating domain objects

Grails Serializable Session Plugin — 0.3: force session to accept only serializable objects

Grails Remote Pagination Plugin — 0.2.6: provide tags for pagination and sort columns without page refresh using Ajax; loads only the list of objects needed

Grails JavaMelody Plugin — 1.6: integrate JavaMelody system monitoring tool into Grails applications

Results Of The Grailsrocks Survey (interest in commercial plugins)

Marc Palmer has released the results of his survey inquiring into developers’ interest in support for commercially supported Grails plugins. (The results also contrast such details as the versions of Grails in common use.)

Grails 1.4: The New Resources Stuff

Glen Smith describes his experience with Marc Palmer’s resources framework in Grails 1.4 M1.

Groovy 1.8.0 — Meet JSONBuilder!

An article by Evgeny Goldin, introducing the new native JSON support added in Groovy 1.8.0.

Luke Daley joins Gradleware

Luke Daley, Grails committer and creator of the Geb project, has joined Gradleware [PDF], the “enterprise automation company” behind Gradle.

SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) 2.7.0 M2 released

SpringSource has announced the second milestone release of STS 2.7.0. This release adds (among, as usual, other things) support for Grails 1.4 and improved Gradle support.

And the GR8Conf interviews continue

GR8Conf Europe 2011 is happening next week in Copenhagen. This week, the organizers published their interviews of Luis Arias, Hamlet D’Arcy, and Peter Ledbrook. There are only four days left for registration, which is currently open at http://gr8conf.eu/register.

Grails UI plugin 1.2-SNAPSHOT available

Peter Ledbrook is looking for feedback on the latest snapshot release of Grails UI 1.2. Particularly if you have had a JIRA issue on the project and it was marked as “resolved for 1.2,” give it a try.

DZone interviews Marc Palmer on Grails

Next in DZone’s series of Groovy interviews, Andres Almiray interviews Marc Palmer, author of more Grails plugins than the earth has ever known. They discuss how he got involved with Grails, his Resources plugin (which is to be merged into the Grails core), Weceem (the Grails-based CMS), his advice for beginning plugin developers, and very much more.

Grails Activiti plugin uses in production

Lim Chee Kin has posted some of the responses to his question on the Activiti plugin‘s Google group: “How do you use Grails Activiti plugin?”

One Ring, a scripting rules engine server

Peter McNeil has open-sourced version 0.2 of his OneRing, a scripting rules engine service written in Grails. OneRing is, he says, meant to be used as a web service that allows central storage of rules common to multiple applications.

Gj update

Nagai Masato has updated Gj, his script for creating executable JAR files from Groovy source projects. This updated version includes the option to bundle Groovy with your project.

New Grails-powered site: CocoaConf.com

Apparently, even iPhone/iPad and Mac developers know that the best tool for web applications is Grails!  Check out the new Grails-powered site, http://cocoaconf.com.

Addressing A Few CSS Pain Points Using The Grails Resource Plugin

Kim Betti shows how several difficult aspects of CSS can be handled by clever use of the Grails Resources plugin.

Plugin releases

Grails View Models Plugin – 0.1: provide support for MVVM pattern in Grails

Grails Stella Plugin – 1.4: integrate Stella framework with Grails

Grails PayPal Plugin – 0.6.2: use PayPal for Grails payment processing

Grails jQuery Plugin – 1.5.2: provide integration with jQuery JavaScript library

Grails jQuery JSON Plugin – 2.2: supply jQuery JSON resources

Grails CloudBees Plugin – 0.1: allow standalone integration with CloudBees client API

Grails Extra Validators Plugin – 0.2: provide bundle of extra validators for Grails

Grails iBATIS Plugin – 1.3.1: use MyBatis data mapper framework with Grails

Weceem 1.0 RC1 released

The first release candidate of Weceem 1.0 was announced yesterday. Weceem is a Grails-based CMS, which can be run standalone or as a plugin in a Grails application. From the announcement: “This release represents the final 1.0 feature set, and only critical bug fixes will be performed now before a final 1.0 release in the coming weeks.” You can download this RC from weceem.org (which is, coincidentally, powered by Weceem).

An Example Of Why I Like Spock

Howard Lewis Ship, creator of the Tapestry framework, gives an example of how Spock “[makes] writing tests fun, instead of a chore.”

Gradle 1.0 M2 released

The Gradle team has released Gradle 1.0 Milestone 2. Among many other changes, there is now a Sonar plugin; you can analyze a project with Sonar from the project’s Gradle build. See the release notes for more.

Groovy And jMusic: Starting A DSL

Tiago Antão has just started developing a Groovy DSL for jMusic. (It is, he says, currently at version 0.0.0.0.0.1 pre-pre-pre-alpha.)

GR8Conf speaker interview series

The GR8Conf organizers are getting ready for GR8Conf Europe 2011, which is coming up on May 17 in Copenhagen. (There’s just two days left for the Early Bird discount.) Their speaker interview series is continuing; this week, they’ve published interviews of Rene Gröschke, Andrew Eisenberg, Stefan Armbruster, Stéphane Maldini, Guillaume Laforge, and Rob Fletcher.

Plugin releases

Grails Resources Plugin – 1.0 RC2: “a resource management and processing framework”

Grails CodeNarc Plugin – 0.12: add static code analysis to Grails application, using the CodeNarc library

Grails FilterPane Plugin – 2.0.1: “adds filtering capabilities to any Grails application”

Grails Full Calendar Plugin – 1.5.0.1: use Adam Shaw’s FullCalendar jQuery plugin

Grails Ajaxflow Plugin – 0.2.1: extend Grails webflow capability; provide support for “ajaxified webflows”

Grails ActiveMQ Plugin – 0.3: embed Apache ActiveMQ in Grails application

Grails Localizable Plugin – 0.1: provide wrapper for the Google Maps Geocoding API

Grails Taxonomy Plugin – 1.1: categorize objects using hierarchical tags

Grails Redis GORM Plugin – 1.0.0 M4: provide “GORM-like” API for Redis in Grails

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