Archive for January, 2012

This Week in Grails (2012-04)

Monday, January 30th, 2012

Peter Ledbrook started a HOWTO series this week for Grails; the first one is on upgrading to Grails 2.0 and there’s also a HOWTO on writing HOWTOs.

We could use your help finding invalid JIRA issues (e.g. already fixed or no longer an issue). Check out the section “Reviewing issues” in the wiki page on contributing to Grails for how to use the new “Last Reviewed” and “Flagged” fields.

Tomas Lin wrote up his experiences deploying Grails applications to AppFog. It’s great to know that there’s another viable cloud provider for Grails developers.

STS 2.9.0.M2 was released this week. Check out the new and noteworthy PDF for what’s been updated in the Groovy, Grails, and Gradle support.

I released a new plugin this week, to support using Ratpack in a Grails application. Thanks to James Williams for his post that got me started and inspired the plugin. And within a day there was already a blog post by Matthias Hryniszak on using the plugin.


If you want to keep up with these “This Week in Grails” posts you can access them directly via their category link or in an RSS reader with the feed for just these posts.


Translations of this post:



Plugins

There were 3 new plugins released:

and 17 updated plugins:

  • atmosphere version 0.4.2.1. Provides integration with the Atmosphere project, a portable AjaxPush/Comet and WebSocket framework
  • ckeditor version 3.6.2.1. Implements the integration layer between Grails and the CKEditor web rich text editor.
  • date-formatting version 0.2.5. Adds functions to the Date object to convert into various string formats
  • foundation version 2.1.4.3. Provides the Foundation CSS framework resources
  • google-visualization version 0.5. Provides a taglib for the interactive charts of the Google Visualization API
  • grails-melody version 1.11. Integrates the JavaMelody system monitoring tool
  • gsp-taglib version 0.3.2. Makes it possible to declare tags in a gsp in grails-app/taglib
  • jasper version 1.5.2. Enables use of JasperReports
  • rich-domain version 1.0.6. Provides dependency injection for POGOs that are not Grails domain classes
  • spring-security-mock version 1.0.1. Mock authentication support for Spring Security
  • spring-security-saml version 1.0.0.M11. SAML 2.x support for the Spring Security Plugin
  • spring-security-shibboleth-native-sp version 1.0.2. Shibboleth Naitive SP support for the Spring Security grails plugin
  • syntax-highlighter version 3.0.83. Adds a Syntax Highlighter for displaying code samples in GSP pages
  • tiny-mce version 3.4.7. Integrates the TinyMce editor javascript and tags to embed the editor in your GSP pages
  • twitter4j version 0.3.2. Send and receive Twitter messages using the twitter4j library
  • xwiki-rendering version 0.4. Convert texts using XWiki Rendering Framework
  • zkui version 0.4.1. Seamlessly integrates ZK with Grails’ infrastructures; uses the Grails’ infrastructures such as GSP, controllers rather than zk’s zul as in ZKGrails plugin

Interesting Tweets

Jobs



User groups and Conferences


Grails plugin for Ratpack

Sunday, January 29th, 2012

I saw James Williams’ post on Running Ratpack inside Grails earlier this week and thought that it should be implemented as a Grails plugin, so I started playing with it. There isn’t much in the way of documentation yet, but what’s there is at the plugin portal page. The source for the plugin is here if you have any fixes or suggestions.

This Week in Grails (2012-03)

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

You only have a few more weeks to get your talk proposals in for GR8Conf EU and US. The EU page is here and the US page is here; both conferences have a February 15th deadline.

Lots of Spring Security items this week. I broke war deployment in the spring-security-core 1.2.7 release so I released version 1.2.7.1 to address that. There’s a new plugin to integrate a Shibboleth native SP, and one for mock authentication. And Carsten Block did a blog post on restricting concurrent user sessions (also see the updated post).

Check out Tsuyoshi Yamamoto’s summary of the Groovy & Grails eXchange 2011 in London. Lots of cool photos, including one of the three developers of the Acegi plugin – it was the first time we were all in the same place together.

I released a new plugin this week to help with deploying applications to JBoss. Each version of JBoss has various things that need to be done to get an app deployed, so I thought it’d be best to encapsulate that in a plugin that does the work for you. It works with version 5 and 6, but no support for version 7 since there isn’t one that supports Grails yet (due various bugs that will hopefully be addressed in 7.2).


If you want to keep up with these “This Week in Grails” posts you can access them directly via their category link or in an RSS reader with the feed for just these posts.


Translations of this post:



Plugins

There were 4 new plugins released:

and 14 updated plugins:

  • build-info version 1.2.2. Provides a controller/view that display basic information about the war file
  • clover version 3.1.3. Integrates the Clover code coverage tool
  • commentable version 0.7.7. Mark up any of your domain classes as having comments and then use the tag library and partial templates to integrate comments into your views
  • dao-artefacts version 0.4. Provides a way of using DAOs in Grails applications.
  • external-config-reload version 0.4.8. Polls for changes to external configuration files (files added to grails.config.locations), reloads the configuration when a change has occurred, and notifies specified plugins by firing the onConfigChange event in each
  • hibernate-search version 0.4. Integrates Hibernate Search for domain classes
  • infinispan version 0.4.5. Adds support for the JBoss Infinispan distributed cache
  • jasypt-encryption version 1.1.0. Integration the Jasypt encryption library
  • mahout-recommender version 0.5.2. Use Apache Mahout recommendation algorithms in your project
  • marshallers version 0.1.1. Easy registration and usage of custom XML and JSON marshallers supporting hierarchical configurations
  • pusher version 0.2. Wrapper for pusher.com REST api
  • simpledb version 0.3. Integrates the AWS SimpleDB datastore into Grails, providing a GORM API onto it
  • spring-security-core version 1.2.7.1. The official Grails security plugin; integrates with Spring Security
  • spring-security-mock version 1.0.0. Mock authentication support for Spring Security

Interesting Tweets

Jobs



User groups and Conferences


This Week in Grails (2012-02)

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Gr8Conf Europe announced a new look this week for their site (based on Weceem) and that their Call for Papers is open. If you want to speak in Copenhagen be sure to get your proposals in by the February 15th deadline.

The plugin portal got a few new features recently. Plugin pages now display the syntax for declaring the plugin in BuildConfig.groovy instead of using install-plugin. For example the spring-security-core plugin’s value is compile ":spring-security-core:1.2.7". Plugins that use extra jar repositories also display that information, for example spring-mobile. Plugins now display usage data (although it’s limited so the numbers aren’t very valid yet). The spring-security-core plugin displays “Used by approximately 35% of Grails users”.

Peter’s started a project to collect HOWTO guides for Grails. Hopefully this will evolve into a large collection, created both by the core team and the community.

Bobby Warner is back this week with two screencasts, both on CoffeeScript. Check out
Getting Groovy with CoffeeScript and Another Adventure with Grails and CoffeeScript.


If you want to keep up with these “This Week in Grails” posts you can access them directly via their category link or in an RSS reader with the feed for just these posts.


Translations of this post:



Plugins

There were 4 new plugins released:

  • foundation version 2.1.4.1. Provides the Foundation CSS framework resources
  • fbootstrapp version 0.1.1. Provides FBootstrapp CSS framework resource files
  • spring-security-mock version 0.9.8. Mock authentication support for Spring Security
  • jquery-mobile-scaffolding version 0.1. Provides mobile templates that can be used during the scaffolding process

and 21 updated plugins:

  • atmosphere version 0.4.2. Provides integration with the Atmosphere project, a portable AjaxPush/Comet and WebSocket framework
  • bubbling version 2.1.4. Provides integration with the Bubbling Library YUI extension
  • build-info version 1.2.1. Provides a controller/view that display basic information about the war file
  • commentable version 0.7.6. Mark up any of your domain classes as having comments and then use the tag library and partial templates to integrate comments into your views
  • cucumber version 0.2.2. Test your Grails apps with Cucumber
  • dao version 0.4.2. Enables a grails-app/dao directory to setup beans. See https://github.com/basejump/grails-dao
  • dojo version 1.7.1.3. Integrates the Dojo javascript toolkit
  • excel-import version 1.0.0. Excel & CSV Importer & Exporter using Apache POI
  • facebook-sdk version 0.1.2. Allows your application to use the Facebook Platform and develop Facebook apps on Facebook.com or on web sites (with Facebook Connect)
  • geolocation version 0.4. Adds HTML5 geolocation support and offers some utility methods to calculate distances and range checks
  • gorm-jpa version 1.0.0.M1. Implementation of GORM for JPA 1.0
  • grails-ui version 1.2.3. Provides a standard UI tag library for ajaxy widgets using YUI
  • hibernate-jpa-provider version 1.0.0.M1. Integrates Hibernate as a JPA provider
  • jasper version 1.5.1. Enables use of JasperReports
  • jquery-validation-ui version 1.2.3. Client Side Validation without writing JavaScript
  • rateable version 0.7.1. Adds a generic mechanism for rating domain objects
  • release version 1.0.1. Publishes Grails plugins either to a public or private repository
  • routing version 1.1.6. Send and route messages to a wide variety of destination endpoints directly from your Controllers and Services using Camel
  • screencasts version 0.5.6. Allows the upload, management and display of screencasts
  • svn version 1.0.2. Provides SVNKit as a dependency; an SvnClient class that makes it easier to work with Subversion; and integration with the Release plugin
  • uploadr version 0.5.8. HTML5 Drag and Drop file uploader

Interesting Tweets

Jobs



User groups and Conferences


“What’s New In Grails 2.0” at NEJUG

Friday, January 13th, 2012

I gave a talk at NEJUG tonight on the new features in Grails 2.0, with some coverage of the new features in Groovy 1.8 and a live coding demo of the “Twitter in 40 minutes” application. Many thanks to the organizers for the invitation, Constant Contact for hosting, and to the attendees for the great questions and enthusiasm.

You can download the talk slides here and the completed demo application here.

To see the earlier recorded talks that I based mine on check out Peter Ledbrook’s screencast of the new 2.0 features and Guillaume’s talk at Greach on Groovy 1.8.

This Week in Grails (2012-01)

Monday, January 09th, 2012

Graeme updated his blog and has committed to posting more often – check out the new digs.

Bobby Warner’s published a great screencast this week on using Grails 2.0 and Spring Security – Jump Into Grails 2.0

Jochen Theodorou wrote up an in-depth overview of the invokedynamic API. I think I may need to read this one a couple of times before it sinks in 🙂


If you want to keep up with these “This Week in Grails” posts you can access them directly via their category link or in an RSS reader with the feed for just these posts.


Translations of this post:



Plugins

There were 4 new plugins released:

  • jxl version 0.5. Export data to Excel using the JXL library
  • swiss-post-code version 0.1.2. Provides all available Swiss post codes
  • ajax-proxy version 0.1.1. Ajax Proxy Plugin (for cross-domain requests)
  • facebook-sdk version 0.1.1. Allows your application to use the Facebook Platform and develop Facebook apps on Facebook.com or on web sites (with Facebook Connect)

and 13 updated plugins:

  • asynchronous-mail version 0.3. Send email asynchronously by storing them in the database and sending with a Quartz job
  • audit-trail version 2.0.0. Adds created/updated audit fields to domain classes and updates them after a new insert or update
  • bulkload version 0.1.4. Export or bulkload all the instances of a given class from the client browser
  • compass-sass version 0.6. Compass, SASS and SCSS support for Grails. Automatically compiles .scss/.sass during run-app, and adds other framework functionality
  • cucumber version 0.2.1. Test your Grails apps with Cucumber
  • cxf-client version 1.2.5. Use existing (or new) Apache CXF wsdl2java generated content to invoke SOAP services
  • date-formatting version 0.2.3. Adds functions to the Date object to convert into various string formats
  • facebook-graph version 0.14. Provides access to the Facebook Graph API and makes easier the development of a single sign-on using the Facebook Authentication proposal.
  • jasper version 1.3.0. Enables use of JasperReports
  • routing version 1.1.5. Send and route messages to a wide variety of destination endpoints directly from your Controllers and Services using Camel
  • routing-jms version 1.1.5. JMS integration for the grails-routing plugin
  • translate version 1.2.1. Translates text from one language to another using the Google Translate API
  • uploadr version 0.5.7. HTML5 Drag and Drop file uploader

Interesting Tweets

Jobs



User groups and Conferences


This Week in Grails (2011-52), and the year in review

Tuesday, January 03rd, 2012

Happy new year! This is the final “This Week in Grails” for 2011. I went back through the previous 51 posts and counted up the totals for what I’d posted throughout the year (including this week): there were 840 miscellaneous items, 693 tweets, 888 Jobs (including several reposts), and 167 new plugins (only 3 weeks without a new plugin) and 724 plugin updates. I didn’t count meetup listings because I repeated most of them several times.

It was an interesting year for the Grails/Groovy ecosystem:

  • Grails had its final 1.3 release (1.3.7) and the big one, 2.0
  • There were four Groovy 1.7.x releases (1.7.7-1.7.10) and six 1.8.x releases (1.8.0-1.8.5) along with beta releases of 2.0 (currently at Beta 2)
  • Gradle also had several milestone releases and is getting close to a 1.0 beta and final 1.0 release
  • There were several Groovy++ releases, although development seems to have stalled given that Groovy code is getting static features
  • SpringSource Tool Suite had several releases, 2.5.2, 2.6.0, 2.6.1, 2.7.0, 2.7.1, 2.7.2, 2.8.0, and 2.9.0.M1 and the Groovy-Eclipse plugin also had several; both added tons of cool new features to help Groovy and Grails development
  • Grails now has excellent options for deployment to various cloud providers thanks to the aws (Amazon), cloud-foundry, cloud-bees, and heroku plugins
  • Marco Vermeulen created Ubuntu packages for Grails and Groovy
  • Stéphane Maldini and Damien Vitrac reworked the look and feel of the reference docs
  • We migrated JIRA from Codehaus to http://jira.grails.org/ and now each plugin has its own project instead of being a component in one huge project
  • Erik Pragt and Marcin Erdmann did some very cool stuff to get Groovy working in Android with their discobot project. I’m looking forward to seeing more of that
  • We now have the “This week in Spring”, “This week in Gradle”, and the occasional “This week in Discobot” series

There were nine conferences that were entirely based on the Groovy ecosystem or had multiple related talks:

  • Spring IO in Madrid
  • GR8Conf Europe in Copenhagen
  • GR8Conf US in Minneapolis
  • GeeCON 2011 in Krakow
  • SpringOne/2GX in Chicago
  • Greach in Madrid
  • CamelCaseCon in Düsseldorf
  • GR8Conf Australia in Canberra
  • Groovy & Grails eXchange in London

Lots of cool posts from a few notable bloggers: Mr Haki (http://mrhaki.blogspot.com/), Tomas Lin (http://fbflex.wordpress.com/), Bobby Warner (http://www.bobbywarner.com/), and Jochen Theodorou (http://blackdragsview.blogspot.com/). I won’t highlight anything in particular – just go to their blogs and read everything 🙂 Set aside extra time for Mr Haki though; he’s done approximately one million posts so far.

I released 10 new plugins:

  • database-migration
  • spring-security-kerberos
  • spring-security-appinfo
  • cloud-foundry
  • cloud-foundry-ui
  • standalone
  • memcached
  • cloud-support
  • atomikos
  • heroku

(11 if you count reworking the webxml plugin and adding a new feature for filter-mapping element sorting).

This series is now translated into Spanish (Aitor Alzola), Chinese (Jian Hu), Portuguese (Paulo Pereira), and Italian (Luca Canducci). These guys do a great job every week.

If 2011 is any indication of the future, 2012 will be a very good year to be a Grails developer.


If you want to keep up with these “This Week in Grails” posts you can access them directly via their category link or in an RSS reader with the feed for just these posts.


Translations of this post:



Plugins

There were 2 new plugins released:

  • stripe version 1.0.M6. Use Stripe to process credit card transactions
  • quartz2 version 0.2.2. Integration with Quartz 2 framework from quartz-scheduler.org

and 18 updated plugins:

  • activiti version 5.8.2. Integrates the Activiti BPM Suite and workflow system
  • activiti-spring-security version 0.4.6. Integrates Spring Security to Activiti as custom IdentityService
  • ajax-uploader version 1.0. Tag Library which implements Andrew Valum’s excellent file uploader
  • browser-detection version 0.3.3. Provides a service and tag library for browser detection
  • bulkload version 0.1.2. Export or bulkload all the instances of a given class from the client browser
  • cloud-foundry version 1.2.1. Integrates Cloud Foundry’s cloud deployment services to manage the running of Grails applications in the cloud from the command line
  • cxf-client version 1.2.4. Use existing (or new) Apache CXF wsdl2java generated content to invoke SOAP services
  • jasypt-encryption version 1.0.1. Integration the Jasypt encryption library
  • oauth-scribe version 1.3. Provides oAuth integration for Grails, using the Scribe framework
  • quick-input version 0.1.2. Provides new input tags supporting some mass input capabilities
  • rabbitmq version 0.3.3. Integrates with Rabbit MQ messaging
  • routing version 1.1.4. Send and route messages to a wide variety of destination endpoints directly from your Controllers and Services using Camel
  • routing-jms version 1.1.4. JMS integration for the grails-routing plugin
  • spring-security-core version 1.2.7. The official Grails security plugin; integrates with Spring Security
  • spring-security-facebook version 0.5.4. Plugin for Facebook Authentication, as extension to Grails Spring Security Core plugin
  • spring-security-radius version 1.1.1. RADIUS support for the Spring Security plugin
  • twitter-bootstrap version 1.4.0.14. Twitter Bootstrap CSS framework resource files
  • viaboxx-dbmigrate version 1.3.2. Setup and migrate the database of your project

Interesting Tweets

User groups and Conferences


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