January Groovy News

The groovy new screencasts by Bobby Warner

Bobby Warner, the author of the Grails Ruby plugin, has begun what I assume is a series of screencasts on Groovy topics. He has two up so far:

• Jump Into Grails 2.0
• Getting Groovy With CoffeeScript

grails.io: Graeme Rocher’s new blog

Graeme Rocher, who as some of you may remember is the creator of Grails, has a new blog on Tumblr (or “tumblog,” or “tumblr,” or “tumble-log” — I honestly can’t keep track of what Tumbling people call these things), and a 2012 New Year resolution to “blog more.” This resolution seems to be working out. See grails.io to keep up with his posts, including (recently) :

• Musings On Maven
• Custom Implementations Of GORM

Source Code, PDF and Presentation about Groovy 1.8 from JFall 2011

Mr. Haki (of “Groovy Goodness” fame) has posted slides and code from a Groovy 1.8 presentation of his at JFall 2011 (an annual conference put on by the NLJUG). There is also “an extensive PDF with content” (1.8 recipes, similar to his Groovy Goodness posts). The whole of it is on GitHub.

Groovy Static Type Checker: Status Update

For the last month, Cédric Champeau has been employed at SpringSource and working on Groovy. Among other things, he is working on a static type checker for Groovy. (As he puts it: “…the main goal of this project is to make the compiler grumpy, meaning it will complain where regular Groovy does not.”) This project has been discussed on the Groovy mailing list for some time now. The official (well, by Cédric) update, posted on the 3rd, goes into some detail on what is and is not dealt with, and in what manner, in Groovy’s “grumpy mode.”

Converting Groovy Maps To Query Strings

Ken Kousen has put up another classic ( ) “Stuff I’ve learned recently…” post (“Yesterday I was teaching a class on Groovy when I suddenly realized there was a simpler way to do something I’d been doing for years”), this time on converting a Groovy map to a query string for use in a RESTful web service.

Gaelyk Presentation At SpringOne2GX

Guillaume Laforge has posted the slides from his Gaelyk session at SpringOne 2GX.

Our sources tell us that Groovy and Grails people across the world have been conspiring together to make this week one with scarcely any Groovy news whatsoever. However, they were unable to counteract the powerful groovy forces that, left unattended, resulted in

SpringOne 2GX

Last month, which is to say “last week” (literally, “yesterday”), on the 25th, about 21 groovy Groovy and Grails experts got together with some Spring people for the third annual SpringOne 2GX. The attendees (and speakers) have started the review posts. These are currently available:

Glen Smith: “SpringOne2GX 2011 was one Groovy Show!”

“What a fantastic time we all had at SpringOne 2GX in Chicago over the last week. My head is jam packed full of information and I have so many new things to add to my list of cool Groovy tech to explore!”

Guillaume Laforge: “Groovy Domain-Specific Languages in Chicago”

“With my friend Paul King, we ran our Groovy Domain-Specific Languages talk again this year in Chicago, for the SpringOne2GX conference. I’ve uploaded the slides on Slideshare, and Paul has pushed the examples on Github.”

The Grails Podcast: “Episode 128: Groovy Grails BOF at SpringOne2GX”

“This episode is a live recording that was made at SpringOne2GX on the Wednesday night, so there’s about 50 or 60 Groovy and Grails guys hanging out, talking with the project leads and the core committers about all things Groovy and Grails.”

Griffon-ness

Andres Almiray, having already warned us that there was Griffon news to be coming up, has this week put up a couple of new posts on various Griffon-related topics:

Griffon: to SQL or NoSQL

A common question asked in the Griffon mailing list is: can GORM be used with Griffon? Sadly the answer is no, not yet. However this doesn’t mean there’s no persistence support for Griffon at all….

Griffon: hanging by a thread

Java Swing developers are well aware of the golden Swing Rule. Given that it’s so easy to break it we at Griffon try to make your life easier by sticking to conventions.…

There is more at his blog, which you should be reading anyway.

Six Ways To Become A Better Grails Programmer

Tomas Lin covers six ways in which Grails developers can take advantage of  many learning opportunities; half of them involve helping others learn.

SpringOne 2GX

The “premier Java event of 2011” — SpringOne2GX, put on by SpringSource and the excellent folks at No Fluff Just Stuff, begins today. Of course, you cannot sign up at this late hour, but I can at least taunt you with the schedule, to let you see exactly what you’re missing (don’t worry — I am sadly not attending it, either). Check back here next week; if any attendees get to posting about the conference afterwards, as Mr. Haki did with GR8Conf, I will try to let you know here.

“Groovy Goodness” by Mr. Haki is back

Mr. Haki has returned to his series on Groovy language features after a few months away. Many of the bits he discusses are new in Groovy 1.8, and all are worth the reading.

Patching bean-fields On 2.0.0.M2

The bean-fields plugin by Marc Palmer is messed up a bit in Grails 2.0 M2 by a breaking change in that release. This will not be an issue in RC1. In the meantime: Glen Smith explains how to resolve it with a simple modification to the taglib.

Groovy On GitHub

This summer, the Groovy team (with help from Matthew McCullough) moved Groovy’s source to GitHub. See the links in this post by Guillaume Laforge.

Plugin releases

Grails Alfresco Plugin — 0.5: integrate Alfresco with a Grails application

Grails Horn Plugin — 1.0: provide JS libraries and tags for embedding data in HTML content

Grails Twitter Bootstrap Plugin — 0.2: provide Twitter Bootstrap files

Grails Image Builder Plugin — 0.1: provide a simple image builder

Grails Geolocation Plugin — 0.2: add HTML 5 geolocation support

Grails External Configuration Plugin — 0.4.5: reload external configuration files

Grails Spreadshirt Plugin — 0.5: integrate Spreadshirt API features into a Grails application

Grails Cucumber Plugin — 0.1.0: test Grails applications with Cucumber

Grails GSP Template Rendering Plugin — 0.1: cache rendering of a GSP or fragment of a GSP

Grails Template Profiler Plugin — 0.1: profile GSP template rendering time, etc.

Grails Console Enhancement Plugin — 0.2: enhance Grails console output for better visibility

Grails Bean Fields Plugin — 1.0 RC3: provide tags for rendering form fields for domain and command objects

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

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

Countdown To Grails 2.0: Static Resources

Peter Ledbrook continues his series of posts on upcoming features with the next Grails release, now titled “Countdown to Grails 2.0.” He gives an excellent introduction to Grails’ Resources plugin, which is to be included in Grails 2.0 apps by default.

GradleSite plugin

Rene Groeschke has put together a Gradle plugin for generating project websites. From the README: “This plugin was originally written for a live demo at the GR8conf 2011 in Europe. At the moment this plugin is just a kind of a wrapper for the mvn site generation as some projects reported, that the missing gradle site support is a blocker for them. Later this plugin should move from a plain wrapper to a first class website generation of gradle (multi)project builds.” The source is on GitHub.

Getting Started With Grails And MySQL

Andrew Taylor walks us through the process of converting a new Grails app’s setup to use MySQL from the default (HSQLDB).

Creating Ratpack Apps With The Gradle Application Plugin

James Williams demonstrates how Gradle’s Application plugin can be used to run Ratpack apps (as an alternative to building an executable or using the Groovy script).

“Grails 1.4 is now Grails 2.0”

Yesterday, Graeme Rocher announced the renaming of the next release of Grails — which was to have been 1.4 — to 2.0. (The Grails Roadmap has been updated for this change.) From the announcement: “This should not significantly impact timelines of the  release, but we do feel there are too many great things in the GitHub master branch for it to be a mere 1.4 release.” There is a list of new features to be released as part of the next milestone in the mailing list post.

Griffon 0.9.3 beta 2 released; Griffon moves to GitHub

The second beta release of Griffon 0.9.3, also announced yesterday, includes such updates as DSL / autocompletion support for IntelliJ IDEA / Eclipse and several new AST transformations. (There are release notes at the CodeHaus.) Along with this update came the news that Griffon’s source has moved to GitHub. If you have anything worth adding to / using for improvement in the framework, fork the project and code away.

Preview of Grails plugin for SmartGWT

The folks at Isomorphic Software have posted about a preview version of their SmartGWT plugin for Grails. This includes a nice tutorial (with screenshots!) for getting started with the plugin.

Geb 0.6.0 released

With the news of the 0.6.0 release of Geb — a Groovy browser automation solution — comes the news of a new site for the project: gebish.org. Luke Daley’s announcement includes the feature highlights of the new release, among them improved jQuery integration, the  Direct Download API, support for build-related configuration, a TestNG adapter, and many more which I must cease to list lest the link to the announcement become pointless. You may want to check out the new site for much more.

Tools Used At A Grails Startup

Tomas Lin describes the tools & infrastructure in use at Secret Escapes, a “private sales travel” site built on Groovy and Grails.

Redis, Groovy And Grails Presentation At GR8Conf 2011 And GUM

Ted Naleid has posted the slides from his presentation on Grails & Redis, which he’s given at both GUM and GR8Conf.

Plugin releases

Grails Pusher Plugin — 0.1: provide wrapper for the Pusher REST API

Grails YUI 2 Widget Plugin — 0.1: allow creation of YUI Widgets through taglibs

Grails Transaction Management Plugin — 0.1.1: allow advanced management of transactions in Grails

Grails Flyway Plugin — 0.1.2: provide integration with Flyway

Grails Cookie Plugin — 0.2: extends request and response objects found in controllers and filters; add methods to easily set, get, and delete cookies