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

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


5 Responses to “This Week in Grails (2011-52), and the year in review”

  1. T.Yamamoto says:

    Hi Burt,
    Here’s new translation. Japanese version.

    http://grails.jp/news/2011-52.html

    Cheers!

  2. Steve Dalton says:

    Hi Burt
    Great writeup – just a small correction – GR8Conf AU was in Canberra (part of Open Source Developers Conference). The confusion probably lies in the fact most of the organisers are from Brisbane 🙂
    Steve

  3. Krystian says:

    Hi,

    It is difficult not to see that recently Grails [mostly thanks to 2.0 release] development is a bit stalled. Enter Grails Jira and for example Roo Jira and take a look at the activity chart. I remember the days when one could raise a jira issue and it gained interest in moments. Now there are issues standing there idle long time. I know you guys probably have a lot of work, however it is something easy to notice and something to consider starting next project.
    I hope it’s just a sum of christmas period, 2.0 release and quite a few grails [& related] meetings.

    Anyway, thanks a lot for 2011. For me it was all about grails 🙂

  4. Mike Miller says:

    Great job leading the way with this series. “This week in Grails” is one of my can’t miss reads every week.

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