This Week in Grails (2010-50)

Update: Check out the traducción al español

Update #2: Check out the Chinese translation: Grails每周观察

Last week’s post was rather popular so I’ll try to make this a regular thing. To re-cap, this series of posts will contain Grails and Groovy related items that I come across each week and want to bring more attention to.

Groovy & Grails Exchange

The big item of the week was the 2010 Groovy & Grails Exchange at Skills Matter in London. I went last year and it was a blast. They were uploading videos of talks shortly after the speakers finished, so you can view them online now – go to the conference page and click on the ‘View the podcast here…’ links. You can also check out the Flickr photostream

They’ve already announced the 2011 conference too – only £75 until January 31st.

Miscellaneous Items

• Grails 1.3.6 release
  • We released v1.3.6 of Grails this week. Lots of fixes and enhancements (over 100 issues closed). You’ll also notice that the distribution downloads a lot faster now that we’re using Amazon S3
• Groovy 1.7.6 and 1.8-beta-3 releases
  • Groovy 1.7.6 and Beta 3 of 1.8 were released. We’ll be using 1.8 in Grails 1.4 so it’ll be cool to have the new features and performance enhancements available for Grails apps.
• GR8 Conference Europe 2011
  • GR8 Conference 2011 has been announced and will be May 17th-19th in Copenhagen.
• http://hashable.com/
  • apparently hashable.com is a Grails app: https://twitter.com/#!/jwhitmire/status/13810193649369088
• STS/Insight Screencast
  • Check out this screencast showing how to use Insight with STS to see performance and profiling information for a Grails application
• inconsequential NoSQL project
  • The inconsequential project has added a lot of new providers and subprojects since the last time I checked it out
• More large-scale Grails usage
  • I wish I could talk about this email from one of our sales managers: “we met with a team that is looking to re-write hundreds of internal applications in Grails”. Great to see Grails being used by big companies.
• GSP tag autocompletion
  • STS will be smarter about providing taglib autocompletion and usage information in v2.5.2 (out soon) if developers add javadoc information – all of the Grails tags have been updated, and plugin developers should do the same
• Can you make a large application with Groovy and Grails?
  • Yes you can 🙂
• Updated reference doc search widget
  • I just noticed that the search widget at http://grails.org/doc/latest/ now auto-hides. That’s convenient since before it would obscure in-document searches when using CTRL-F.

I forgot to mention an item last week, the new Google Groups discussion list Grails Startup Support Group created by Warner Onstine. Lots of information for developers working on (or interested in working on) a Grails-based startup.

Plugins

There were 5 new plugins released:

• local-storage version 0.1. Provides a simple tag-based wrapper around the HTML5 local storage mechanism.
• riak version 1.0.0.M1. GORM for the Riak NoSQL datastore
• routing version 1.0.1. Replacement for the abandoned Camel plugin
• routing-jms version 1.0.1. ActiveMQ JMS support for the routing plugin
• elasticsearch version 0.13.0-a. Adds support for the http://www.elasticsearch.com/ RESTful search engine

In addition there were three new plugins released that aren’t (yet) available using the standard install-plugin mechanism:

• Less CSS preprocessor
• jQuery Validation UI
• batch-launcher A plugin to use Grails in a non-web environment

There were also several updated plugins:

• blueprint version 1.0.1. Provides Blueprint CSS framework resource files and tags
• dojo version 1.4.3.5. Adds the Dojo javascript toolkit
• geb version 0.5.1. The functional testing plugin that all the cool kids are using
• infinispan version 0.3.7. Adds support for the JBoss Infinispan distributed cache
• jquery version 1.4.4. jQuery javascript toolkit
• jquery-ui version 1.8.7. jQuery javascript toolkit UI widgets and tools
• multi-tenant-ehcache version 1.0.1. Ehcache Support for the Multi Tenant plugin
• rendering version 0.4. Render GSPs as PDFs, JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs
• resources version 1.0-RC1. Static resource handling
• spock version 0.5. The unit testing framework that all the cool kids are using
• ulc version 0.3.2. Provides access to the Canoo UltraLightClient (ULC) RIA kit
• weceem version 1.0-M1. Grails-based content management system (CMS)
• zipped-resources version 1.0-RC1. GZips javascript and CSS

Interesting Tweets

• @HamletDRC: the next groovy 1.8 beta is coming and i just saw a whole bunch of changes labeled “performance improvements” get checked in.
• @j_brisbin: Pushed docs for #springdata #Riak stuff, working on #Grails #GORM docs now, M1 on both this week? http://bit.ly/dhH353 http://bit.ly/a3waEZ
• @cjug: @cgug meeting tomorrow, and there is now a @cgug job board as well: see www.cgug.org/jobboard #Groovy #Grails #ChicagoJava
• @mfloryan: Northwesters Memorial Hospital, one of the biggest in US, runs their internal systems on #grails /cc: #energizedwork #grailsx
• @mittie: #grailsx at Sky broadcasting corp.: 50+ grails devs, 7+ projects, very-high load sites, 98% groovy, 2% legacy Java
• @mittie: new #grails plugin: reverse-engineer to create domain classes and mapping from the DB schema #grailsx
• @aalmiray: the release train keeps on chugging: #spock 0.5; #groovy 1.7.6/18b3; #grails 1.3.6, #gpars 0.11; #griffon 0.9.2b3 (soon!); #gradle/#gaelyk?
• @aalmiray: count another successful port of #grails plugin to #griffon -> quartz is up and running
• @aalmiray: almost finished with porting grails-routing (#camel) to #griffon however I don’t know if the routes are working or not =/

Jobs

• http://www.hautelook.com/careers#java_developer__based_in_chicago_
• @simon_prickett: Gannett Digital is looking for a talented #mobile web developer to work on #grails / #groovy projects in McLean, VA. Contact me. #jobs
• @antony: @zacksm @wangjammer5 yep, sky always hiring! If you have any decent #grails perm staff, send them my way.

Stuff I’m working on

Now that 1.3.6 is finished I’ve started merging the Datasources plugin into Grails core for 1.4. It’s mostly finished except for a few more tests and documentation. I’m looking into adding JTA and 2PC support but that might have to wait until 2.0.

I had almost finished the Database Migrations plugin before switching gears to work on 1.3.6 fixes, so that should hopefully be finished this week.

If you’re interested in using closed-source plugins using compiled classes then you should check out the Binary Artifacts plugin I released this week (blog post here). I’m curious about how people might use it and of course am interested in suggestions for enhancements, so let me know if you’re using it.

Update: Check out the traducción al español Update #2: Check out the Chinese translation: Grails每周观察 Last week’s post was rather popular so I’ll try to make this a regular thing....

This entry was posted on Friday, December 17th, 2010 at 9:00pm and is filed under grails, grailsplugin, groovy, java, ThisWeekInGrails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.