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Archive for the ‘grails’ Category

News Roundup: Gaelyk, GR8Conf .au, Groovy O’Reilly Screencast

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

Gaelyk 1.1 released

Last Wednesday, Guillaume Laforge announced the 1.1 release of Gaelyk, the lightweight Groovy toolkit for the Google App Engine. This version runs on Groovy 1.8.4 and version 1.6.0 of the App Engine SDK, and it includes a lot of additions or improvements to the asynchronous datastore (among, of course, many other things). See the announcement post for a complete change list (and an explanation of the three new annotations used for bean / entity coercion).

Using Browser Push In Grails

Robin Bramley explains how to make use of event-driven updates in a Grails app (the article begins with a detailed look at browser push methods).

Groovy Debugging

Aaron Babcock has, after being disappointed by Groovy’s REPL for debugging purposes, created “an experimental utility [called] gdb.”

Gdb is a jar file (“gdb.jar”) you include in the classpath of a script you want to debug. In the script you add the line “com.gdb.GdbShell.gdb()” wherever you want to drop into a REPL….

Grails, PhoneGap And Fun @ OSDC2011

Glen Smith reports the happenings of the first Australian GR8Conf (and the OSDC following).

Tips And Resources For Creating DSLs In Groovy

Jakub Holý summarizes tips given by Paul King in his JavaZone 2011 talk on Groovy DSLs.

Up and Running Groovy: An O’Reilly screencast for my Manning book (wait, what?)

Ken Kousen is back from a venture into the dark ages of 2009. He comes to us with a screencast and a long story.

News Roundup: Gretty, Gradle, And Ruby On Grails

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Java development 2.0: Ultra-light Java Web Services With Gretty

Andy Glover has written an article for his IBM developerWorks series on Gretty, the ultra-light web server framework based on Groovy++.

Gradle: Domain Specific Language Based Build Tool

The Fall 2011 issue of Methods & Tools contains an article by Evgeny Goldin in which he introduces Gradle, focusing on its heavy use of Groovy DSLs.

Smart Bash / Zsh Aliases To Run Appropriate Grails Version

Ted Naleid has posted a helpful bash script which can decide which version of Grails to run for a project based on its application.properties file.

Groovy Goodness: Use inject Method On A Map

Mr. Haki is, as I noted last week, back to posting groovy tidbits in his daily Groovy Goodness series. Today he shows us how to use Groovy’s inject() method in a Map. (This feature is new in Groovy 1.8.1.)

A Ruby Plugin For Grails

This week, Bobby Warner announced that he has created a plugin which integrates JRuby with Grails. He wrote a post on his blog, describing how he built the plugin, and its source is (of course!) on GitHub (see also: the plugin’s sample application). This entire deal started as a follow-up effort to his earlier post, “Polyglot Grails,” in which he described a Grails application that can calculate Pi in Clojure, Ruby, Python and JavaScript.

News Roundup: New Groovy Releases, Grails 2.0 M2, Groovy++, and Happy Birthday, Griffon

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

Groovy 1.8.2 And 1.9-Beta-3 Are In The Wild

Guillaume Laforge and the Groovy development team have announced new releases in both of the Groovy branches: 1.8.2 in 1.8 and the third beta of 1.9 (which due to an accidental early release had to be renamed from “beta 2”). These are both chiefly bug-fixing releases, but, as Guillaume points out, they also include “the completion of the primitive type arithmetics performance optimizations.” (This has a somewhat targeted audience: “Microbenchmarks affictionados should be happy.”) You can see the release notes at the CodeHaus, but you are going to download it anyway, so…

Groovy++ 0.9.0 released

Also in Groovy language releases: Alex Tkachman has announced Groovy++’s 0.9.0 release. They are expecting to have 1.0 out before October 4. (This release has been tested with Groovy core v. 1.8.2.)

And speaking (or typing) of Groovy++: Here is a set of benchmarks (Groovy++ vs. Java) which was recently brought to my attention.

Grails 2.0: a second milestone release

The Grails development team has released the second milestone of Grails 2.0. This is worthy of some excitement: if you follow that link (or even if you do not, seeing that I am here telling you about it), you may notice that this is the last milestone release of Grails 2.0. The next release will begin the round of RCs, and the Grails developers expect to have the final 2.0 release out in mid-October. You may wish to see the “What’s New” section of the docs again; it has been updated for this milestone.

A New Skin For The Groovy Website

Have you visited groovy.codehaus.org recently? (I jest. Of course you have not.) Guillaume Laforge, in response to the plea of millions of developers a discussion on usability and user experience as it relates to language adoption ;) , has put together a (temporary) (very fine-looking) new design for Groovy’s website. The Groovy team is already working with a web designer for a better and more lasting design, as well as improving Groovy’s documentation. See Guillaume’s blog post for details on how it was done (and a disclaimer).

Griffon Reaches 3rd Year

Andres Almiray has put up a birthday post for Griffon, the Groovy RIA framework, which was started three years ago this week (or rather last week). The Griffon team is working on “two big overhauls” to the framework; for now, he describes several highly interesting features available in the current release.

Optimising Your Application With Grails Resources Plugin

Marc Palmer has posted a highly detailed article describing the use of his Resources plugin for Grails (which will be built into Grails by 2.0).

Groovy, Fastest Growing Language According To eWeek

This was spotted by Guillaume Laforge: eWeek’s new article on programming language trends tells us that “…in the time frame this slide show depicts, Groovy saw the largest increase in jobs” (this begins in November 2009).

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 Pluginupdated for Netbeans 7.0.1

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

News Roundup: GBench, Graffiti, Grails Contributors

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

GBench 0.2.0 released

Nagai Masato has released version 0.2.0 of GBench, the “benchmarking framework” for Groovy. He’s also nicely summarized the additions and improvements on his blog.

Screencast — Get Your Groovy On #2: Graffiti

Merlyn Albery-Speyer has put up a second “Get Your Groovy On” screencast, this time on Graffiti. Graffiti is another “lightweight web framework” for Groovy, inspired by Sinatra.

Book Review: Building And Testing With Gradle

Mike Miller has posted a sort of review (or perhaps rather a summary) of Building And Testing With Gradle (O’Reilly), by Matthew McCullough and Tim Berglund.

New Grails Contributors site

Grails Contributors is a new site for, ah, Grails contributors, being developed with (but of course!) Grails by Bobby Warner and several (for lack of an equivalent term) contributors. It’s inspired by the Rails Contributors site; the code is on GitHub awaiting pull requests.

 

News Roundup: Groovy On Android, Groovy WS, Groovy++

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

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

News Roundup: Interview With Hamlet D’Arcy, Live Snippets, GroovyCasts, Weceem 1.0, GBench, Parallel Grails Versions On Ubuntu

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Grails Podcast, Episode 125: Interview With Hamlet D’Arcy

The latest episode of the Grails Podcast contains an interview with Hamlet D’Arcy, committer to both the Groovy and CodeNarc projects. It covers everything from Spock and Groovy In Action to “lean software” and Hackergarten.

Weceem 1.0 released

This week, the Weceem development team announced the 1.0 release of their Grails-based CMS. This release adds new tags, “space templates,” breadcrumb and menu improvements, new options for storing uploaded files, and updated documentation. From the announcement: “This release is the culmination of two and a half years of work, with each incremental release adding new features in the builds up to 1.0. …user feedback has been incorporated along the path to 1.0.” You can read the full release notes and download Weceem at (of course!) weceem.org.

Griffon Todo App

At GR8 in the US this year, James Williams, among other things a Griffon committer, demonstrated the building of a todo application using Griffon. The code is now on GitHub.

Live Snippets: “[bringing] code snippets and documentation together in a live demo”

Live Snippets — a Grails app running on Cloud Foundry — is becoming somewhat filled with reference documentation which “targets all Groovy and Grails related stuff.” The code for this is also available on GitHub.

GBench now available in Maven Central

Nagai Masato has just announced that GBench is now available in Maven Central (and can thus be accessed via Grape). GBench is a benchmarking framework for Groovy; it provides an AST transformation & builder for benchmarking methods without modifying their existing code.

GroovyCasts: a new host for Groovy screencasts

Merlyn Albery-Speyer has announced the release of his new site for hosting Groovy-related screencasts: groovycasts.org. There are already such screencasts by Merlyn and Hamlet D’Arcy as “Get Your Groovy On” and “Getting Started With Spock And Groovy.” See the site for the rest.

Grails Parallel Versions On Ubuntu Through Launchpad PPA

Marco Vermeulen describes the installing of Grails on Ubuntu using Launchpad PPA (one example: running “sudo apt-get install grails” will install the latest stable release of Grails).

Greach: “the Groovy Spanish conf”

Greach is “a conference dedicated to [the] language Groovy and all the frameworks and tools that have been created around [it]: Grails Griffon, Gradle, GPars, Spock, Gant, Gaelyk, etc.” (to quote from Google Translate’s impression of the homepage). It is free, and will be held in Madrid on November 4. (Registration opens on September 1.)

Plugin releases

Grails Quartz Monitor Plugin — 0.1: provides a “clear and concise page” for administering Quartz jobs

Grails Calendar Plugin — 1.0 RC1: helps to develop applications with calendar capabilities

Grails Standalone Plugin — 1.0: run a Grails application as a JAR file with an embedded Tomcat server

Grails MongoDB / Morphia Plugin — 0.7.3: alternative GORM implementation for MongoDB

Grails i18n Fields Plugin — 0.5.2: provide declarative way of localizing domain classes’ fields for different languages

Grails DB Stuff Plugin — 0.4.0: DB schema management and data import / export

Grails Export Plugin — 1.0: export domain objects to CSV, Excel, ODS (Open Document Spreadsheets), PDF, RTF, or XML

News Roundup: Commercial Grails Plugins, Grails 1.4 and Resources

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

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.

News Roundup: Gj, Groovy Interviews, Grails UI, OneRing

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011
GR8Conf Europe 2011 is happening next week in Copenhagen. This week, the organizers published their interviews of Luis Arias
http://www.gr8conf.org/blog/2011/05/03/104,
Hamlet D’Arcy
http://www.gr8conf.org/blog/2011/05/06/105,
and Peter Ledbrook
http://www.gr8conf.org/blog/2011/05/09/107.
There are only four days left for registration, and it’s 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,” try it out
http://grails.org/plugin/grails-ui
.
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.
http://groovy.dzone.com/news/dzone-interviews-marc-palmer
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?”
http://limcheekin.blogspot.com/2011/05/is-grails-activiti-plugin-production.html
One Ring, a scripting rules engine server
Peter McNeil has open-sourced version 0.2 of his OneRing
http://nerderg.com/One+Ring
, 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.
http://grails.1312388.n4.nabble.com/ANN-One-Ring-a-Scripting-Rules-Engine-Server-Groovy-amp-Grails-tt3508875.html
New Grails-powered site: CocoaConf
Gj update
Nagai Masato has updated
http://nagaimasato.blogspot.com/2011/05/gj-is-updated.html
Gj, his script for creating executable JAR files from Groovy source projects
http://nagaimasato.blogspot.com/2011/04/gj-it-is-simplest-way-to-distribute.html
. This updated version includes the option to bundle Groovy with your project.
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.
http://grails.org/plugin/resources
http://www.developer-b.com/blog/entry/2036/2011/may/06/addressing-a-few-css-pain-points-using-the-grails-resource-plugin
Plugin releases
http://grails.org/plugin/view-models
http://grails.org/plugin/stella
http://grails.org/plugin/paypal
http://grails.org/plugin/jquery
http://grails.org/plugin/jquery-json
http://grails.org/plugin/cloud-bees
http://grails.org/plugin/extra-Grvalidators
http://grails.org/plugin/ibatis

And the GR8Conf interviews continue

GR8Conf Europe 2011 is happening next week in Copenhagen. This week, the organizers published their interviews of Luis AriasHamlet 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