Skip to main content.

News Roundup: Groovy Goodness, Groovy On GitHub

September 20th, 2011

“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

Share and Enjoy:
  • description
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Simpy
  • StumbleUpon

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

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).

Share and Enjoy:
  • description
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Simpy
  • StumbleUpon

News Roundup: Gaelyk CRUD, Betamax, GPars Performance, Vsnap

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)

Share and Enjoy:
  • description
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Simpy
  • StumbleUpon

News Roundup: groovy-wslite, Grails DB Migrations, Grails Project Stats

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

Share and Enjoy:
  • description
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Simpy
  • StumbleUpon

News Roundup: CodeNarc-Eclipse, Discobot, GroovyHelp, Griffon

August 16th, 2011

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

Share and Enjoy:
  • description
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Simpy
  • StumbleUpon

News Roundup: Gaelyk 1.0, Bloogaey, GroovyServ, Grails vs. Rails, CodeNarc

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

Share and Enjoy:
  • description
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Simpy
  • StumbleUpon

News Roundup: Grails 2.0 M1, Linked Ratpack, CodeNarc

August 2nd, 2011

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

Share and Enjoy:
  • description
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Simpy
  • StumbleUpon

News Roundup: GBench, Graffiti, Grails Contributors

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.

 

Share and Enjoy:
  • description
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Simpy
  • StumbleUpon

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

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

Share and Enjoy:
  • description
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Simpy
  • StumbleUpon

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

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

Share and Enjoy:
  • description
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Furl
  • Simpy
  • StumbleUpon