Skip to main content.

Archive for the ‘groovy’ Category

News Roundup: Groovy In Action, GR8ness for Java developers, and the future of Grails

Tuesday, April 16th, 2013

On the second edition of Groovy In Action

Over on the Jworks blog, Erik Pragt, famed Groovyist blogger, tells a long and tragic tale of the second edition of GinA. Mr. Pragt himself has, since work on the second edition was begun, joined the notable list of authors, and has already written a couple of chapters (at least one of which you may find in the current MEAP version). Josef Betancourt replies to this news with some ideas for this second edition, noting (as has been noted of old time by them that are given to note such things) that the current web documentation for Groovy is “clunky to use.” Oddly enough, your humble News Editor has frequently found that the documentation on the website is itself out of date, and with its lack of either editorial oversight or regular maintenance it is falling behind, in usefulness, various and scattered blog postings dug up by means of creative Google searches. Those of you interested in seeing an update to everyone’s favorite programming language guide, hear Mr. Pragt in conclusion: “So keep spamming the forums, keep spamming the authors, keep us sharp, and shout your interested. We will deliver!”

“Where next for Grails?”

Peter Ledbrook:

“I think that Grails is currently defined more by what it provides than by what it’s for. What any project needs, just like any business, is a vision. Normally there is a vision for a project at it’s inception, because that provides the drive for it’s creation. Years down the line though, that vision needs to be refreshed.”

This is an excellent (and long) look at where Grails is today, where it could be going, and where (in Mr. Ledbrook’s opinion) it should be heading. What it seems to come down to is that, for a framework such as Grails, There Is More Than One Way To Do It, and different applications will require or be better suited to different approaches, any of which Grails could conceivably be built to handle well. There are a number of good thoughts by thoughtful Grails people on the post itself, and Marc Palmer writes at Grailsrocks that “[if] you care about the future of Grails you should write about it and tell the world, either on that post or on your own blog.” Expect, as we do, to hear more on this.

InfoQ video: “Groovy & Grails for Java Developers”

And speaking of Peter Ledbrook: InfoQ has put up the video of his SpringOne 2GX talk, “Groovy & Grails for Java Developers”, with the summary “Peter Ledbrook shows how Groovy can be useful for writing scripts, unit tests or builds for Spring projects and how Grails simplifies web application development.”

GProf 0.2.0 released

Yes, that was fast. Nagai Masato’s GProf was released not quite two weeks ago, and already there is a version 0.2.0. It is available in Maven Central and, in addition to “important bug fixes,” it adds support for Grape, multi-threaded applications, and filtering by thread names. See the blog post.

Grails Podcast 139: Interview with Peter McNeil

Continuing with the GR8Conf speaker theme, this week Glen Smith interviews Peter McNeil, creator of the GoodForm plugin for Grails.

Groovy in search of sponsor for new CI server

The Groovy development team announced today that it is intending to move its continuous integration processes from Atlassian’s Bamboo (provided by Atlassian to Codehaus, which hosts Groovy’s current web home) to an installation of TeamCity by JetBrains. The TeamCity instance will of course require a new dedicated server to run on, and so the Groovy team is looking for an individual or company willing to sponsor it. See the detailed announcement on the Codehaus site for more on this.

News Roundup: Geb, GProf, GR8Conf, And The Grails Podcast

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

Geb 0.9.0 available. Geb, the Groovy browser automation tool, is even now as we speak at version 0.9.0. For the benefit of those of you that for whatever bizarre reason are not on the Grails user mailing list (seriously? Why?!), we give this, from Marcin Erdmann’s announcement posted there:

“Please have a look at new features, fixes and braking changes for this release listed here: http://www.gebish.org/manual/current/project.html#090.

“We would also like to bring to your attention a breaking change that should be keept in mind when migrating: Browser’s to(Class<? extends Page>) method now changes the page on the browser and _verifies the at checker_ of that page in a single method call. You should use via() if you need the old behaviour of to() method (see http://www.gebish.org/manual/current/browser.html#at_checking for details).”

Geb has a very nice manual, by the way. You probably should check this out.

GProf: a new profiler for Groovy. This last Wednesday, Masato Nagai, the creator of GBench, announced the first release of GProf, which he says does for Groovy programs what GNU gprof does for ones in C and C++. There is a nice example in his announcement post (and also on the project’s homepage, which is at Google Code). Do try this out and send him some feedback. For now, you’ll have to download a JAR (or create one from the project source) by hand, but there are plans (we are told) to put this on Maven Central, for those of you that might need that.

GR8Confs approaching. GR8Conf Europe is coming back to Copenhagen on May 22-24, 2013 marking GR8Conf’s fifth anniversary. Registration is still open for that, and of course, being GR8Conf, they have quite the impressive list of Groovy Luminaries coming to address the gathered Groovyists.

Also, GR8Conf US is going to be back in Minneapolis (MN) this July, on the 22nd and 23rd (also with the usual pre-conference workshop day, which is July 21). If you can’t be persuaded to make it out to Denmark this spring, you might be interested in Minneapolis in the summer instead. Early Bird prices are still available now. There is even a hackathon being put on by Target on Sunday night (the 21st) after the workshops, with real actual prizes involved. Unless you have something against Minnesota (?!) or Target gift cards I say that you definitely should consider going to this. (First, though, go and subscribe to the Grails mailing list.)

CodeNarc’s Eclipse plugin has been updated. Eclipse-type users of CodeNarc now get to make use of version 0.18.2.

Grails Podcast Episode 138 (!). I have neglected to keep up with the workings of the Grails Podcast crew, but they are very much still in action and have just yesterday released their Episode 138. This is the astoundingly-groovy Glen Smith of groovyblogs.org fame interviewing GR8Conf Europe speaker Jan Reher, whose session there will be “We chose Grails and Groovy for a real-world project. Was it wise?”

“Grails Best Practices”. DZone’s Groovy Zone has published an article by Nitin Kumar on “the usage and best practices around the Grails.” This is lengthy and contains some good stuff.

News Roundup: Grails plugins being discontinued, Road To Grails 2.3

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

Sad days for the Grails community

Marc Palmer, the Groovyist genius behind about half of the Grails plugins you use with any regularity, has been forced to discontinue support for those plugins given the time and effort it has been costing him to maintain them:

“I absolutely love Grails and would not currently choose any other web framework to make web apps.
“However it is completely unsustainable for me to work unpaid on this stuff, in fact I should have called this a year or two ago. Releasing plugins used in many peoples’ apps involves a high degree of responsibility, as well as ongoing support and maintenance.… Personally I invested a lot of energy, time and money to try to achieve a sustainable development model. These attempts have not received the level of support from the community needed to make them viable.…
“The upshot is that I’m afraid I can no longer do any development or support work on Grails plugins unless I am paid to do so.”

I do recommend that you read the entire post if you are at all involved in the use or distribution of Grails or Grails plugins. If you’d like to take on the maintenance of one or more of these plugins, be sure to carefully read the procedure that Mr. Palmer describes at the end.

Plugins by Rob Fletcher to be discontinued

For reasons similar to Mr. Palmer’s, Rob Fletcher, another plugin author of some small fame, will be “deprecating” a number of plugins that he has started in the distant and mostly no-longer-applicable past. For the lists of which of his plugins he will continue to maintain and which he is now passing on to possible interested contributors, see his post.

Graeme Rocher on The Road To Grails 2.3

Grails 2.3 is coming up, the Roadmap tells us, in the second quarter of 2013. Last month, Graeme Rocher — who as the creator of the framework knows some detail about it — began a new series on his blog, discussing some of the changes (always improvements, of course) that we can look forward to in 2.3. See what he has so far:

And just generally if you’re not keeping up with Grails.io (Mr. Rocher’s blog) and are in some way using Grails, you are Doing It Wrong.™

Grails seminar for Java developers, at JDriven

Mr. Haki of Groovy (and Grails, Griffon, and Gradle) Goodness fame has announced that his company, JDriven, will be holding a Grails seminar on March 26th. See his blog post for further detail, and if you are a Java developer in or near Nieuwegein and interested in getting started with Grails, be sure to check that out.

News Roundup: Groovy 2.1, Interview on Grails 2, Gradle In Action, and the road to Grails 3.0

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

Interviews for all my Groovy friends!

For Groovy and Grails project committers, February (and the whole of 2013 in general) seems to be a bit of what they might perhaps call “busy,” as months (and years) go. In the past couple of weeks, interviewers and conference organizers have been publishing most fascinating reports on the progress of Groovy the language and Grails the framework, with important recent releases just behind us and exciting new ones coming up. From our friends at InfoQ, we have:

Guillaume Laforge on Groovy 2.1

We officially noted the first beta of Groovy 2.1 earlier this month — it was released in the dark ages of December last year, and we had been told to expect the final 2.1 by perhaps as soon as the end of January. Lo and behold, it is now here, and this last week Victor Grazi for InfoQ spoke with Guillaume Laforge on some of the newly-available features we’ve been eagerly awaiting from this release, such as GPars and support for invokedynamic from Java 7. There’s some good stuff on the mindset that the Groovy committers employ in deciding what will be included and in what fashion in newer releases of Groovy, and even some bonus sneak peeking into the direction in which the Groovy of the future will be heading in the months and years, yea, the decades to come.

Jeff Brown on Grails 2

Dio Synodinos interviewed Grails committer and generally legendary Groovyist Jeff Brown at QCon last year, mostly on Grails 2 but also some on the current state and popular applications of Groovy. They’ve just put up the video of this interview, and there’s even a transcript (which if somewhat hard to get to is at least nice for those who for whatever reason prefer to read rather than watch). I would recommend this very much even if only for the discussion on Groovy itself, but obviously as Mr. Brown is an exceedingly smart fellow and just recently co-authored The Definitive Guide To Grails 2 with Grails creator Graeme Rocher, the entire thing is worth watching (or perchance reading).

And from other Groovy sectors of the universe, we have the following:

Graeme Rocher on “The Road To Grails 3.0”

Greach, “the Groovy Spanish conf,” just happened last month in Madrid, and its wise organizers have put up video of some of the sessions there. This includes Graeme Rocher’s on the upcoming features of Grails 2.3, which we should be seeing in the near future — the official roadmap suggests  a release in Q2 this year — and on 3.0, which we should also be seeing sometime in this very to-be-groovy year of 2013. This is of course nicely recent, and who better to expound upon the future of Grails than the project lead? Have see.

Manning’s Gradle In Action now in Early Access edition

Any of our reading audience that are familiar with the popular Groovy build tool Gradle are no doubt also familiar with Benjamin Muschko, one of the Gradle community’s more actively active members. He is now in the midst of writing a book on Gradle for Manning’s In Action series; it is scheduled to come out in paperback form this fall, and this paperback can be preordered, but in the meantime, those of our readers that favor electronic devices for the use of reading can get Gradle In Action in ebook form now through Manning’s Early Access Program. If you do so, you get to not only make use of the book in its early pre-release form but also to provide Mr. Muschko with helpful feedback as he is writing the book — he of course gets to incorporate this feedback into what will be the final version of the book.

A groovy effort to update documentation — and a site redesign

“Groovy is a very mature and widely used language on the Java platform, with hundred thousands of developers worldwide. However, one area where the Groovy project can do better is with its documentation.… We’re launching an effort towards overhauling our documentation and web presence.” Thus begins Guillaume Laforge’s February 8 message to the Groovy user list, announcing a community-wide effort to improve and better present Groovy’s documentation and website. The official Groovy team members are going to be the ones moving this forward for the most part, of course, but they are looking for feedback (this is where the “community” part comes in) and suggestions on how and where to work at Groovy’s online presentation. Those of you with ideas here should not fail to get involved.

“The Groovy Conundrum”

The editorial opinion recently published at DrDobbs.com on the curious current position of Groovy in the larger JVM language space seems to have been a motivating consideration for the Groovy team in this aforementioned plan of revamping. In summary, Andrew Binstock says: “Groovy is one of the most interesting JVM languages, but its longtime performance issues kept it confined to narrow niches. However, a series of important upgrades look like they might push the language into the mainstream. There’s the conundrum.” You may wish to read the full article.

Wanted: a Massachusetts Groovy developer to help change the world

Vsnap, the Boston-based startup which we have mentioned in the past as building its video messaging service on the Grails framework, is looking for a Java or Groovy developer in Massachusetts (Grails experience is a plus for the position). If you yourself are currently looking for Grails work in Massachusetts or know of somebody else who is, do be sure to check this out — see their blog post for full details.

News Roundup: GroovyMag News Roundup back (!), January News

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

[Well hello there! Long see, no time!

I have not posted anything here since March of 2012. You see, there has been in the past here a bit of an administrative mixup, system-wise, regarding the machinery behind this blog. As a result of this I, your humble News Editor (I,YHNE,), have been for some time unable to bring you anything significant in the way of news, except in the form of the columns that you have of course been faithfully reading each month as part of your solemn duty, as a devoted reader, to GroovyMag the magazine. To add injurious insult to cliché, the column I,YHNE, had written for the month we are currently enjoying was, because of an unfortunate further mixup on the part of whoever it is whose role it has proven to have mixed up that which was mixed up a result of this particular mixup, left out of the magazine issue for the current month.

So basically, now that we have the blog once again up for your enjoyment and seeing that you, our faithful reader, have missed the news for this month, we are running it here. Please note that as this was formatted to fit the PDF edition of the GroovyMag magazine itself, links are fewer and are (as it were) spelled out rather than inline, and are in some cases shortened; also, everything in here was written late on the evening of the night before the dawning of the morning of the first day beginning what many are now referring to as a “new year,” namely, the year of our Lord 2013. Most of the references time-wise are therefore likely to be roughly a month out of date. —Ed.]


January Groovy News

 

After Groovy & Grails eXchange 2012

The 2012 edition of Skills Matter’s GGX is over, and if you were not there, you get to have a peek at some of the overwhelming Groovyness that appears to have happened by following the following link to some photos of the event by Yu Sodo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/y___u/. In addition there is an “aftermath” post (the only one I’m aware of that was written in English) by Grailsrocks legend Marc Palmer (with links to both video and slides of some of the talks he attended, in addition to his own). See http://is.gd/ggx2012 for that.

The Grails Platform UI Theme Challenge

Speaking of Grailsrocks’s Marc Palmer, we must note that this last month, he released an RC of his Platform UI plugin for Grails. The plugin, he says, “holds massive potential to take the Grails plugin ecosystem to an entirely new level.” Now that we have a UI and theming platform available for Grails, the way is cleared for aesthetically-minded (and UX-minded) developers to introduce high-quality themes (think of these as similar to WordPress themes) that allow developers quick, easy and standardized website construction out of the proverbial box. To encourage theme development, Grailsrocks has announced the Platform UI Theme Challenge: theme developers acting quickly can enter their productions for a chance to win some astoundingly-cool prizes (and potential fame and fortune at next year’s GGX). See http://is.gd/uichallenge — an update to the original announcement — as well as the original announcement (linked to in the update) for complete details. Mr. Palmer has officially extended the challenge and it will remain open now until at least the first five entries are submitted. If you do Grails and know design, be certain to check this out.

Grails 2.2 released

The ever-at-work Grails development team has now released to the eagerly-waiting masses the final release of Grails 2.2, which is the first Grails release to ship with Groovy 2.0. Besides this, 2.2 is said to include over 100 bug fixes, forked JVM execution for the embedded Tomcat, new functionality for criteria queries, and more besides. See the “What’s New” section of the documentation at http://is.gd/grails22new2; as usual, this release is freely available at http://grails.org/download.

GPars 1.0: “arrived”

This month, Václav Pech announced that “after four years of development GPars, the Groovy concurrency library, has just reached its 1.0 mark.” This release of course certainly marks a major milestone for the library, which for the past couple of years has been varyingly committed to by (beside Václav) Paul King, Dierk Koenig, and Russel Winder, among other respected Groovyists. Links to the downloads and other GPars-related pages are in the announcement post at http://is.gd/gpars1.

Also released: Groovy 2.0.6 and 2.1b1

The Groovy development team has been faithfully continuing their own repeated committings to both the 2.0 and 2.1 branches of the Groovy project, and for the last releases of 2012 they bring us 2.0.6, a bug-fixing release for the 2.0 branch, and the first beta of 2.1. Work appears to be moving quickly on this next new breed of groovy Groovyness, and according to Guillaume Laforge’s estimate of a week ago, we could be seeing a final release of 2.1 by the end of January (next month, my sources tell me). For especially-detailed notes on some of what you can expect with that new breed, see his official announcement at http://is.gd/groovy21b1.

A new “Groovy developers” Google+ Community

Also from Mr. Laforge come the glad tidings of this new Google+ Community for Groovy developers: http://is.gd/gpluscommunity. To quote from a post of his on the mailing list about this, in response to questions on whether that list would be the quieter for this new additional page: “The Groovy community on Google+ is just an additional communication, where people can discuss, exchange ideas, talk about what they’ve done with Groovy, tell the world about their upcoming Groovy-related events, etc. It’s not replacing the mailing-lists for user support, or developer discussions. It’s a complement, an additional communication medium.” If you use Groovy (and of course you do) and are on Google+, be sure to get involved at http://is.gd/groovyplus.

GVM: the Groovy enVironment Manager

Any among our reading audience that recall your humble News Editor’s column from September of this year may recall that in that edition, I mentioned Marco Vermeulen’s “proposal for [a] convenient install tool for Grails, Griffon and Groovy.” That RVM-inspired proposed tool has since been developed and is now available to the Groovy public as GVM: the Groovy enVironment Manager. It is currently at version 0.9.3 and is already in use by countless millions of Groovy developers around the globe. (OK, so perhaps that is a little bit of an overstatement there. Nevertheless the possibilities, as the proverbial saying goes, are truly endless.) It runs on Mac OS X, Linux, Cygwin, Solaris, and bash-equipped BSD, and its Candidates for installation include Groovy, Grails, Griffon, and vert.x (among others now and still others in the future). Get it at http://gvmtool.net and read detailed tutorial information in Andre Steingress’s fine post at http://is.gd/gvmdesc.

An update to the Grails plugin development process

A while back the team behind grails.org reworked the plugin system, creating a new process for plugin developers to submit their plugins for inclusion in the main repository. There is now a special section of the Grails plugin site to handle this process — you get to either submit your own plugin or see the list of currently-pending plugins by others, with Disqus comments below each one. This latest addition to the site represents further progress in the ongoing effort by the Grails developer team to get the community more involved in the generally community-powered process of plugin development, and with the new page for pending plugins, as I understand it, you do not even have to have written your own to be able to help. See http://grails.org/plugins/pending to begin to get involved here.

News Roundup: Links for March 6th

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

At DZone, Geoffrey Papilion’s post on Groovy — “A Reasonable JVM Language for DevOps” — is mirrored at the Groovy Zone.

Grails.org has long had a Screencasts section, infrequently used and a bit dusty, but listing a number of screencasts. In the last few weeks, the listing has been filled by a number of new video tutorials by one Mike Kelly. He has put together a site that hosts an entire series of these videos; it is called “Foundations In Grails.” See it at grailsexample.net.

Shaun Jurgemeyer has posted a series on using vim as a “Grails IDE” (Part 1, Part 2). There are links to fine vim additions, but most interestingly (to your humble News Editor), there are also a number of custom scripts (as well as VimDiff config settings) that he has put together for use with Grails.

Andrew Taylor demonstrates how one can put together a simple web server in Groovy.

Shawn Hartsock has relaunched his Grails QR Code plugin, which “provides intuitive ways to embed QRCodes directly onto any page in your Grails application.”

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.