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Archive for the ‘groovy’ Category

News Roundup: Links for January 31

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Tidbits of the warning type

Grails Database Migration Gotchas, on the refactr blog

Upgrading your app to Grails 2.0.0? Better wait for 2.0.1, on the Schneide Blog

…can haz tutorials?

Running Ratpack inside Grails, by James Williams

Deploying Grails applications on AppFog. First impressions., by Tomás Lin

Using a Griffon ComboBox with an EventList, by Marco Vermeulen

Adding a Web Module to a Gradle Project, by John Holland (Object Partners)

Groovy annotations for ToString and EqualsAndHashCode, by Uday Pratap Singh (IntelliGrape)

Grails & Hudson / Jenkins: Monitoring Build Status, by Robin Bramley

Miscellaneous & at least loosely related

Building with Gradle, by John Holland (Object Partners)

Book Review: Programming Concurrency on the JVM, by Mike Miller

News Roundup: Links for January 17

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Continuing goodness (by Mr. Haki)

Mr. Haki (of Groovy Goodness fame) has some new tidbits up on goodness in Grails:

Continuing Grails screencastery (by Mr. Warner)

Bobby Warner has released another “Grails plus CoffeeScript” screencast (“Another Adventure With Grails And CoffeeScript”).

Upcoming Groovificating conferences

GR8Conf Europe’s Call For Paper[s] is now open! This year, the conference is scheduled for June 6 through 8 (again in Copenhagen).

Tutorials or presentations of potential helpfulness or interestingosity

Generating Excel From Grails, by Shaun Jurgemeyer at Object Partners

Groovy DSL — A Simple Example, by Nirav Assar of Assar Java Consulting

Grails 2.0 — What To Be Excited About (a presentation by Zan Thrash)

Alarming news reports

Elvis carried away by spaceships (Ken Kousen, reporting for Kousen IT)

News Roundup: Links for December 20

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

Your humble News Gatherer has been busy for the last two weeks, and has had little time for the gathering of news. And what did the Groovy community respond with? Why, a bunch of NEWS, of course! Here are links. The titles of most will speak for themselves (if you find that frightening, you may cover your ears — or I may need to use  a different expression).

 

Grails: A Quick-Start Guide is back, by Dave Klein


“Hacking the Grails Spring Security Plugin” at Groovy & Grails Exchange, by Burt Beckwith

 

log.rofl(‘Fun with Groovy metaprogramming’), by Ken Kousen

 

Suggestions to keeping Grails one step ahead – a wishlist, by Tomás Lin

 

Slides from ‘A year in the life of a Grails startup’, also by Tomás Lin

 

The Art of Groovy Command Expressions in DSLs, by Hamlet D’Arcy

 

Grails 2.0 Released with Improved Usability, Class Reloading, and Query DSL, by Rick Hightower for InfoQ

 

Videos and slides of Groovy / Grails eXchange 2011, by Guillaume Laforge

 

The Promises to trust, by Václav Pech

 

The Mahout Recommender Plugin 0.5.1 Released, by Lim Chee Kin

 

IntelliJ IDEA 11 for the Groovy Developer, by Hamlet D’Arcy


News Roundup: Links for December 6

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

Grails 2.0 RC 3 released

The Grails development team has already released the third release candidate for Grails 2. This RC addresses the issues found by the developers that tested RC 2, which was released just last week (how much coffee has SpringSource been going through lately? ;) ). Do download this release and test it, if you’re into that sort of thing. The Grails team is working to make 2.0 final a solid release, and every bit of feedback helps.

Upgrading To Grails 2: Part 1

Speaking of Grails 2.0: Rob Fletcher of Ad-Hockery fame has put up a new post on what his team is doing to “[ensure] that our application is forwards-compatible with the upcoming Grails 2.”

Installing Weceem CMS

Tariq Ahmed gives us some tips for installing Weceem (the Grails-based CMS) on Mac OS X.

Integrating Google Plus In Grails Application

I don’t know why you would want to do this, but if you want to, now you know how (thanks to Vishal Sahu of IntelliGrape).

Five Cool Things You Can Do With Groovy Scripts

They involve Jenkins, CSV, Gretty, and more.

A Script To Run Grails Functional Tests In Parallel

You must be using Geb to run this script.

Grails Productivity Enhancer. The Unsung Hero ‘grails interactive mode’

In which Mohd Farid (also of IntelliGrape) describes (and encourages) the use of the Grails interactive mode.

Latest Happenings And Future Of Groovy: 1.8, 2.o And Beyond

Rick Hightower recently interviewed Guillaume Laforge (the Groovy project manager) for InfoQ. They discuss IDEs, annotations, Grape, JSON, GPars, AST transformations, and a deal more.

Compressing JPG Images With Groovy

Dustin Marx gives us a script for use in (surprise! :) ) compressing JPG images using Groovy.

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: 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)

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