The Grails Podcast: Grails 1.4M1 Discussion

Glen Smith and Peter Ledbrook “have a long look” at the first milestone release of Grails 1.4.

A Simple Groovy DSL For Building RabbitMQ AMQP Applications

Jon Brisbin demonstrates the use of the Groovy DSL for RabbitMQ.

Countdown To Grails 1.4: Unit Testing

Peter Ledbrook has started a new series of articles introducing some of the new features coming in Grails 1.4. The first is on 1.4′s new and improved unit testing for domain classes, controllers, and tag libraries.

A Groovy AST Example

Felipe Gutierrez shows how to create new AST transformations using some of the new functionality in Groovy 1.8.

The slides from GR8Conf Europe

The complete set of slides used by the speakers at GR8Conf Europe last month are now available at SlideShare.

Plugin releases

Grails CKEditor Plugin – 3.6.0.0: integrate CKEditor with Grails

Grails Translate Plugin – 1.1: translate text from one language to another using Microsoft Translator

Grails GPars Plugin – 0.3: add GPars JAR files to a Grails project

Grails Sipgate SMS Plugin – 1.0.2: send SMS messages using XML-RPC API provided by sipgate.de

Grails Ant Plugin – 0.1.1: make Ant JARS available in a Grails project at runtime

Grails Torpedeiro SMS Gateway Plugin – 0.1: provide services to access the Torpedeiro HTTP/S API

Grails Fixtures Plugin – 1.0.7: load test data via a DSL

Grails Activiti Plugin – 1.0.7: integrate Activiti BPM Suite with Grails

Groovy++ In Action: Gretty / GridGain / REST / Websockets

Alex Tkachman has written a sort of tutorial for Gretty, a “very simple web framework for building [asynchronous] web servers and client” written in Groovy++. In addition to showing how to set up a web server in Gretty, the article provides an interesting look at various aspects of Groovy++.

New @Benchmark annotation for Groovy

Nagai Masato has released a new annotation for Groovy: @Benchmark, which can be used to measure your methods’ execution time without additional code. See his announcement for examples.

Better DSL Support For Groovy-Eclipse: Slides from GR8Conf Europe 2011

Andrew Eisenberg has posted the slides from his GR8Conf Europe presentation, “Better DSL Support For Groovy-Eclipse.”

GPars: More slides from GR8Conf Europe 2011

The slides from Václav Pech‘s GR8Conf presentation on GPars, the concurrency library for Java and Groovy, are also on SlideShare.

Plugin releases

Grails jsTree Plugin – 0.1: integrate jQuery’s jsTree plugin with Grails

Grails SWFUpload Plugin – 0.1

Grails Scala Plugin – 0.6.2: compile Scala source from the src/scala and src/java directories of a Grails application

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

Grails Serializable Session Plugin – 0.2: force the session to accept only serialized objects

Grails Spring Security Core Plugin – 1.1.3: secure Grails application using the Spring Security framework

Grails Weceem CMS Plugin – 1.0 RC2: embeds a full-featured but easy-to-use CMS inside your Grails application

Grails Concordion Plugin – 0.1: provide integration with the open-source Concordion framework

Grails Regen Plugin – 0.2.12: merge custom code with scaffolding templates specified in a domain class

Grails Translate Plugin – 1.0: translate text using the Google Translate API

Grails GSP Tags Plugin – 0.2.1: declare GSP tags in a GSP within grails-app/taglib/

Grails 1.4 M1 released

This morning, Graeme Rocher announced the first milestone release of Grails 1.4. There are highlights mentioned, and they include GORM improvements, a new reloading agent, HTML5-enhanced scaffolding, “hugely improved” unit testing, and several others. The Grails team is now looking for feedback on this milestone release. There are release notes at grails.org, and there are more links in the release announcement.

GR8Conf Europe 2011 in review

So GR8Conf Europe 2011 is over. This year the conference started with a “university day,” with two tracks (one intermediate and one advanced) during which there were workshops on everything from Groovy AST transformations to Grails plugins. Then there was the conference itself, which in two days gave opportunity to hear at least one representative from just about every GR8 project out there – Andre Steingress on GContracts, Andres Almiray on Griffon, Burt Beckwith and Peter Ledbrook on Grails, Guillaume Laforge and Jochen Theodorou on Groovy – and many other groovy speakers. Mr Haki, himself a GR8Conf speaker, has posted a three-part review of the conference on his blog (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3).

IntelliJ IDEA 10.5 For The Groovy And Grails Developer

A post by Hamlet D’Arcy on the Canoo blog, detailing the updates and improvements made in version 10.5 of IntelliJ IDEA.

DZone interviews Yasuharu Nakano on GroovyServ

This week, Andres Almiray interviewed Yasuharu Nakano (@nobeans), one of the creators of GroovyServ. They discuss GroovyServ, his opinions on Groovy’s operator overloading, the Japan Groovy and Grails User Group (JGGUG), and more.

ZKGrails 1.4 released

Chanwit Kaewkasi has announced the release of ZKGrails 1.4, which is based on ZK 5.0.7.1. From the announcement: “For the next version of the ZK plugin, we are focusing on moving towards Grails 1.4. Hopefully we can get the next version released shortly after Grails 1.4-M1.” There are release notes to be had at the project’s Google Code site.

A brief introduction to some new annotations in Groovy 1.8

Victor Savkin has put together another screencast, this time showing some of the annotations added in Groovy 1.8.

Resources Plugin And Modular Web Components For Grails Apps

Rob Fletcher elaborates on his answer to a question he received in his GR8Conf talk, demonstrating one use of the Resources plugin.

Plugin releases

Grails Unshorten Plugin – 1.0.3: expand links that have been shortened by any redirecting link shortener without the use of a third-party API

Grails Feature Flipper Plugin – 0.3.2: provide mechanism to turn features off & on within a Grails application

Grails Tomcat Plugin – 1.4.0 M1: make Tomcat 7.0 the default servlet container for Grails at development time

Grails Hibernate Plugin – 1.4.0 M1: provide integration between Grails and Hibernate through GORM

Grails Growler Plugin – 0.1 BETA: use jQuery and its jGrowl plugin to enable Growl-like notifications from remote function calls

Grails Release Plugin – 1.0.0 M2: publish Grails plugins to either public or private repositories; deploy Grails applications and plugins to Maven repositories without direct use of Maven

Grails CloudBees Plugin – 0.1.1: allow standalone integration with the CloudBees API

Grails SimpleModal Plugin – 1.0: ease use of jQuery’s SimpleModal plugin

Grails Notifications Plugin – 0.2.3: implement a publish-subscribe model to push information to subscribers through different communication channels

Groovy-Eclipse 2.5.0 released

This week, Andrew Eisenberg announced the 2.5.0 release of Groovy-Eclipse. The grooviest features here are the new DSL Descriptors (see the blog post for many fine details), the updated outline view for scripts, and the including of Groovy 1.8 as an optional add-on. You can see the complete release notes on the New And Noteworthy page.

ZKGrails releases 1.0.3 and 1.1-M1 for cloud

Speaking of releases: Chanwit Kaewkasi has announced the joint release of ZKGrails versions 1.0.3 and 1.1-M1 (both shipping with ZK 5.0.7).  1.1-M1 is “the first milestone of the 1.1 series. This version of ZKGrails focuses on supporting cloud portability. It is able to deploy to Cloud Foundry already (Hibernate/MySQL, MongoDB as well as Redis).” You can see a running app with ZKGrails on Cloud Foundry at http://zkgrails.cloudfoundry.com/.

GR8Conf Europe’s final speaker interview

GR8Conf Europe 2011 starts today, and the organizers completed their speaker interview series last week with their interview of Burt Beckwith.

Monad comprehensions in Groovy

On the groovy-user mailing list last week, Dinko Srkoc announced his project Monadologie: a Groovy library for monad comprehension. He gives some background in the announcement, and there are detailed examples, build instructions, and suchlike in the README on Github.

Gaelyk 0.7 released

Guillaume Laforge, creator of the Gaelyk framework for Google App Engine, has released version 0.7. Gaelyk now uses Groovy 1.8 and App Engine SDK 1.5.0. Besides this there is now support for the File service, metadata querying in the datastore, and a bit of backend service support. Gaelyk’s tutorial has been updated to reflect the changes, and it is a good place to get started.

Griffon 0.9.3 beta 1 released

This morning Andres Almiray announced the first beta release of Griffon 0.9.3. Besides upgrades to Groovy 1.8.0 and Gant 1.9.5, there was at least one major bug fix and many fine updates to the templating system. There are release notes at The Codehaus, and you can download this release there too.

SpringSource Tool Suite: 2.7.0 M1 released

The first milestone release of STS 2.7.0 is mainly a Groovy one. There are, among the other features mentioned, Groovy 1.8 support and early access Gradle support. There is a New And Noteworthy doc for this release [PDF].

Plugin releases

Grails JProgress Plugin – 0.2: simplify the use of JQuery, Grails and Progressbars

Grails ZKGrails Hibernate Plugin – 1.1 M1: the ZK/Hibernate sub-plugin for Grails

Grails Force Response Download Plugin – 0.1: force browser to open dialog for downloading content produced by controller’s action

Grails Activiti Plugin – 5.5: integrate Activiti BPM Suite into Grails

Grails ZK Enterprise Addons Plugin – 1.0.3: provide JARs required for enabling ZK Enterprise features

DZone interviews Ted Naleid on Grails / Redis

Andres Almiray’s interview with Ted Naleid, in which they discuss his Build-Test-Data plugin for Grails, his other Grails plugins, and using Redis with Groovy.

Mr. Haki’s series on Groovy 1.8 features

Mr. Haki has started an entire new series of posts detailing features of Groovy 1.8.

Grails Podcast, Episode 123: Cloud Foundry & Groovy 1.8

Glen Smith and Sven Haiges have recorded another episode of the Grails Podcast, “mainly about VMWare’s CloudFoundry and the recent Groovy 1.8 release.”

DZone interviews Shawn Hartsock on Gr8 stuff

This week, Andres Almiray also posted his interview of Shawn Hartsock, in which they discuss in detail how he got started with Groovy, the challenges he faced in enterprise integration prior to Grails 1.0, his Audit and QRCode Grails plugins, Gaelyk, and more.

Deploy Grails App To Cloud Foundry Via Command Line

Carsten Block’s tutorial on deploying Grails applications to Cloud Foundry using Ruby’s vmc.

GR8Conf speaker interview

Continuing their speaker interview series leading up to GR8Conf Europe 2011 (which is coming up in two weeks), the GR8Conf organizers interviewed Tom Fuller.

Osama bin Laden killed in Pakistan

Yesterday, Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Our sources will neither confirm nor deny that Groovy and Grails played a significant role.

Plugin releases

Grails Email Confirmation Plugin – 1.0.4: send users email containing click-through links to confirm their email address

Grails Eclipse Scripts Plugin – 1.0.4: Eclipse helper scripts (create .classpath / .project files; download source and Javadocs for use in Eclipse)

Grails Extended Validation Plugin – 1.0.1: add validation capabilities to non-domain classes

Grails Ext JS 4 Plugin – 4.0.0.0: provide resources and template for Ext JS library

Grails Cloud Foundry Plugin – 1.0.0 M1: integrate Cloud Foundry deployment services; manage Grails applications running in the cloud from the command line

Grails Test Code Coverage Plugin – 1.2.2: generate code coverage reports using Cobertura

Grails Release Plugin – 1.0.0 BUILD-SNAPSHOT: publish Grails plugins to public or private repository; deploy Grails applications to Maven repositories without direct use of Maven

Grails Subversion Plugin – 1.0.0 BUILD-SNAPSHOT: provide SVNKit as dependency, provide class SvnClient for easier use of Subversion, and integrate with Grails Release Plugin

Groovy 1.8 RC4 released

The Groovy development team announced the fourth release candidate of Groovy 1.8 on Wednesday. Jochen Theodorou says (in the release announcement): “The main reason [for] doing another RC release is, that some bugs in the new optimization code were found (GROOVY-4741, GROOVY-4756), also there was an obscure GEP-3 bug (GROOVY-4774). Not only for the Grails people and ExpandoMetaClass acrobats the fix to GROOVY-4720 could be interesting.” (The full list of bug fixes and improvements is of course in the release notes.) Download RC4 at http://groovy.codehaus.org/Download.

VMware launches Cloud Foundry: “First Open Platform As A Service”

The folks at SpringSource are hoping for Cloud Foundry – VMware’s newly announced PaaS, currently supporting Rails, Sinatra, Node.js, Spring and Grails apps – to “become the premier deployment model for Grails (and Spring, Ruby, Node.js etc.) applications in the future.” The webinar announcing Cloud Foundry is up at YouTube, and there is a tutorial for Grails applications on Cloud Foundry at the SpringSource blog.

Music DSL With Groovy: Enter AST Transformations

Tiago Antão’s development of a Groovy DSL for jMusic continues – in this post, he introduces Groovy AST Transformations.

Grails Fixtures: A Great Way To Bootstrap Your Data

Partho Ghosh at IntelliGrape shows an example of using the Grails Fixtures plugin.

DZone interviews Ken Kousen on Making Java Groovy

This morning Andres Almiray posted a DZone interview of Ken Kousen, author of the upcoming Manning book Making Java Groovy. They discuss how he got into Groovy, the differences between Grails and Rails, Groovy training, the Groovy community, and, of course, the book, which is currently available through the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP), whereby you get to read the book as it’s written and give feedback to the author. (It’s expected to be in print by Fall 2011.)

Getting Started With Spock And Groovy

Hamlet D’Arcy has posted a screencast on the Canoo blog, demonstrating how to create testing specifications using Spock.

GR8Conf Speaker Interviews

During this past week, the GR8Conf organizers continued their series, with interviews of Ivo Houbrechts, Marcin Erdmann, and Paul King.

Gradle Gaelyk Plugin

Benjamin Muschko and Vladimír Oraný have released a Gradle plugin for Gaelyk. It is now at version 0.1 and its creators are looking for feedback. See the README to get started.

Compile-Time Metaprogramming In Groovy, Part 1

Victor Savkin has started a series on compile-time metaprogramming in Groovy; this is the first post, showing how to write an AST transformation.

Plugin releases

Gradle Gaelyk Plugin – 0.1: provide Gradle tasks for managing Gaelyk projects

Grails Activiti Spring Security Integration Plugin – 0.2.1: integrate Spring Security with Activiti in Grails application

Grails Cloud Foundry Plugin – 1.0.0 M1: use Cloud Foundry‘s deployment services for running Grails applications

Grails Cloud Foundry UI Plugin – 1.0.0 M1: add a monitoring UI for Grails applications on Cloud Foundry

Grails AWS Plugin – 1.1.9.1: ease use of Amazon Web Services

Groovy 1.8 support in Groovy-Eclipse

The Groovy-Eclipse team has added (experimental) support for the Groovy 1.8 compiler. See the announcement, which includes update links for Eclipse 3.6 and 3.7.

Griffon On Tour: Europe

Andres Almiray has compiled a list of upcoming European conferences covering (among other things) Griffon.

GroovyHelp 3.0.0 RC2 released

The second release candidate of GroovyHelp 3 was released on Saturday. This RC fixes a couple of bugs and adds support for Linux. Download it at http://code.google.com/p/groovyhelp/.

Grails JIRA migrated to Grails.org

Last week, the Grails team moved the Grails and Grails Plugin JIRA instances from codehaus.org to http://jira.grails.org. Among other changes, the migrated JIRA gives Grails plugins their own JIRA projects, with their own project leads and teams. If you had an account on the old site, you’ll still get to log in, but you’ll have to go through the “Forgot Password” process.

“What’s Groovy’s Culture?”

An interesting discussion on the groovy-user mailing list, begun by the question: “If I have to explain to someone new to Groovy, how would I describe Groovy’s culture?”

Upgrading Grails 1.3.x to use Hibernate 3.3.2

A quick how-to by Lucas Ward.

New G/GUG in Spain

On Thursday, Enrique Medina Montenegro announced the formation of a new Groovy and Grails user group for the Levante area in Spain. Visit their Google group at http://groups.google.com/group/grupo-de-usuarios-groovy-grails-levante. You can even follow them on Twitter.

Griffon: Your First Plugin/Addon

Another Griffon how-to from Andres Almiray, this time on creating a Griffon plugin.

GR8Conf speaker interviews

GR8Conf Europe is coming up in May, and GR8Conf’s speaker interview series began this week. They have so far interviewed Václav Pech and Erik Pragt. Keep an eye on the GR8Conf blog for more.

Plugin releases

Grails Fitnesse Plugin – 0.9: use the open-source testing framework Fitnesse with Grails

Grails Elastic Search Plugin – 0.15.2.1: integrate ElasticSearch with Grails

Grails Infinispan Plugin – 0.4.0: use JBoss Infinispan (distributed cache) with Grails

Grails Spring Security OpenID Plugin – 1.0.2: enable OpenID authentication in Grails’ Spring Security plugin

Grails Image Cropper Plugin – 0.2: use GSP tag library for Dave Spurr’s JavaScript Image Cropper

Grails Flickr Plugin – 0.1: use GSP tag to display photos returned from a Flickr API search