Archive for June, 2011

This Week in Grails (2011-25)

Monday, June 27th, 2011

Yesterday Graeme tweeted about some cool Grails startups, and it resulted in several replies from others also working on cool Grails startups. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on:

Like most weeks there are several job listings to check out, but I wanted to point out one in particular (the first one in the list). I did some consulting before joining SpringSource and PQA (now a part of SRA International) in Charlottesville, VA was one of the places I worked with. I’m not sure if things have changed now that they’re part of a larger company, but when I worked with them the team was great to work with. Smart people, interesting problems, and as a bonus they’re working on saving the world working with air quality and carbon offset trading. And Charlottesville is a beautiful city. If you’re looking and are nearby or interested in relocating I highly recommend checking them out.

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:

 Miscellaneous Items
 Plugins
 Interesting Tweets
 Jobs
 User groups and Conferences

Plugins

There were 3 new plugins released:

and 5 updated plugins:

  • avatar version 0.5.1. Provides a taglib for displaying avatars
  • filterpane version 2.0.1.1. Adds filtering capabilities
  • i18n-fields version 0.5. Provides a declarative way of localizing domain classes’ fields for different languages
  • jalarms version 0.3. Send application notifications using a wide range of protocols via JAlarms
  • sharding version 0.4. Defines multiple database shards to horizontally scale data

Interesting Tweets

Jobs

User groups and Conferences

grails, grailsplugin, groovy, java, ThisWeekInGrails | Comments (1)

This Week in Grails (2011-24)

Monday, June 20th, 2011

From the developer’s UX perspective, one of the most significant improvements in Grails 1.4 is the drastically reduced verbosity. I mentioned a couple of posts ago that instead of displaying multiple screens of information for each script that’s run, Grails now shows most information on a single line. ANSI escape sequences are also used to highlight different types of output in different colors – for example errors are red. And based on the proposal in this JIRA issue stack traces are now heavily filtered and displayed in a much more readable way, both in the console and in the error GSP. It should be a lot easier to find the real cause of problems now with most of the irrelevant information removed from displayed exceptions.

Congrats to Luke Daley on his new position at Gradleware. This is great news for Grails (and of course for Luke and Gradleware) since he’ll be able to use his knowledge of Grails internals to help with the migration from Gant to Gradle in 2.0.

STS 2.7.0M2 was released this week and it has some cool new features for Grails 1.4, Cloud Foundry, and Gradle.

Although it’s not Grails-related, it looks like Erik Pragt has made significant progress getting Groovy running in Android – cool stuff.

And GR8Conf US is next week!

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:

 Miscellaneous Items
 Plugins
 Interesting Tweets
 Jobs
 User groups and Conferences

Plugins

There were 6 new plugins released:

  • dao version 0.4.1. Enables a grails-app/dao directory to setup beans. See https://github.com/basejump/grails-dao
  • hawk-eventing version 0.5.1. Very simple in-vm event publish / subscribe system
  • hibernate-hijacker version 0.8.1. Publishes intercepted Session instances to a lightweight event broker
  • multi-tenant-single-db version 0.8.1. Multi tenant setup focused on single database mode
  • random version 0.1. Wraps the high-performance, statistically sound Uncommons Maths Pseudorandom Number Generators
  • zkui version 0.3. Seamlessly integrates ZK with Grails’ infrastructures; uses the Grails’ infrastructures such as GSP, controllers rather than zk’s zul as in ZKGrails plugin

and 15 updated plugins:

  • amazonfps version 0.2.4. Accept payments using Amazon FPS
  • atmosphere version 0.4.1. Provides integration with the Atmosphere project, a portable AjaxPush/Comet and WebSocket framework
  • authorize-net version 0.1. Do authorize/capture, void, and refunds through Authorize.net
  • chargify version 2. Provides a simplified intermediate service to integrate with chargify web services to manage billing for your subscriptions-based business.
  • dynamic-jasper version 0.6. Create Jasper reports
  • extjs4 version 4.0.2.0. Provides Ext JS 4 resources
  • file-uploader version 1.2.1. Handles file uploads with multiple configurations
  • freemarker-tags version 0.6.1. Use Grails Dynamic Tag Libraries as Freemarker directives
  • google-visualization version 0.2.3. Provides a taglib for the interactive charts of the Google Visualization API
  • i18n-fields version 0.4. Provides a declarative way of localizing domain classes’ fields for different languages
  • itunes-service version 0.1.2. Facilitates the integration with iTunes Search Services and Feeds
  • jms version 1.2. Makes it easy to both send and receive JMS messages
  • mongodb-tools version 0.1.2. Makes working with MongoDB a little bit more groovy by adding several features such as: a domain object <-> MongoDB Document mapper, database connection management, a groovy-builder to create MongoDB documents
  • spring-security-core version 1.1.3. The official Grails security plugin; integrates with Spring Security
  • webdriver version 0.3.2. Integrates Webdriver with Grails to allow functional testing in both HtmlUnit and real browsers

Interesting Tweets

Jobs

User groups and Conferences

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This Week in Grails (2011-23)

Monday, June 13th, 2011

Grails 1.4 will have support for multiple datasources in core – the work to migrate the Datasources plugin is finished except for documentation updates and a few bug fixes, and I’ve finished a plugin to provide two-phase commit and XA support for JDBC and JMS. This has to be a plugin because it’s too provider-specific, and this first plugin uses the Atomikos library; others can create similar plugins based on other providers.

I was looking for something else and stumbled across this old Bileblog post from 2004 about how the Groovy project was failing. Although it’s a typical profane post from Hani it’s easy to forget that the project wasn’t doing well for a while there and it took a significant infusion of new people and energy (prophetically forecast by the few kind words Hani had in the post for Guillaume Laforge) to get things back on track. I thought the most ironic aspect of the post was how many people said Groovy isn’t necessary because we have BeanShell. How’s that working out for you guys 😉

A big congratulations to Erik Pragt and Marcin Erdmann for their 1.0 release of the Fitnesse plugin. It’s a big deal to decide that you’re feature-complete and comfortable enough with the state of a project to go to 1.0, and too few Grails plugins have done this.

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:

 Miscellaneous Items
 Plugins
 Interesting Tweets
 Jobs
 User groups and Conferences

Plugins

There was 1 new plugin released:

  • enhanced-scaffolding version 1.0.RC1. A collection of Javascript enhancements to Grails’ standard scaffolding.

and 13 updated plugins:

  • file-uploader version 1.2. Handles file uploads with multiple configurations
  • sipgate version 1.0.2. Allows you to send SMS via the SMS-Gateway sipgate.de
  • activiti version 5.6. Integrates the Activiti BPM Suite and workflow system
  • activiti-spring-security version 0.4.4. Integrates Spring Security to Activiti as custom IdentityService
  • atmosphere version 0.4.0. Provides integration with the Atmosphere project, a portable AjaxPush/Comet and WebSocket framework
  • clover version 3.1.0. Integrates the Clover code coverage tool
  • fitnesse version 1.0. Makes it possible to use the popular Open Source testing framework Fitnesse in combination with Grails.
  • fixtures version 1.0.7. Load test data via a convenient DSL
  • full-calendar version 1.5.1.0. Adds support for the FullCalendar jQuery plugin
  • gsp-taglib version 0.2.2. Makes it possible to declare tags in a gsp in grails-app/taglib
  • regen version 0.2.13. Provides a generation framework and a set of pluggable artefacts under grails-app/generators
  • searchable version 0.6. Adds rich search functionality to Grails domain models
  • spock version 0.6-groovy-1.8-SNAPSHOT. Brings the power of the Spock testing and specification framework to Grails

Interesting Tweets

User groups and Conferences

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This Week in Grails (2011-22)

Monday, June 06th, 2011

Lots of tweets and retweets this week about a rendering performance comparison between Rails, Wicket, Grails, Play, Lift, and JSP. The blog author updated the post and benchmarks based on responses from the community, adding a second server option for the Rails test, trying out the new Scala-based templates for Play, and based on feedback from Stéphane Maldini running the tests using the latest 1.4 Grails code. Stéphane and Lari Hotari had already been working on optimizing GSP performance and after profiling this test Lari was able to add a few more optimizations and double the throughput when rendering templates. The numbers for Grails are now only a little slower than using JSPs.

Grails 1.4 development is going well. One cool new feature is a dramatically reduced output on the commandline. Now most lines are rendered on a single line much like recent versions of Gradle. Graeme’s also looking at improving interactive mode which can make running multiple commands extremely fast since you only need to start the VM and initialize Grails once, but currently it suffers from OOME issues. I’ve added support for multiple datasources to core (from the Datasources plugin) and am working on adding two-phase commit (XA/JTA) for JDBC and JMS.

Also, good news for the Translate plugin released last week. Ironically, the day it was released, Google announced that they were cancelling their translation API, but it’s been reworked to use the Microsoft API instead.

Some GR8Conf (EU and US) items of note:

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:

 Miscellaneous Items
 Plugins
 Interesting Tweets
 Jobs
 User groups and Conferences

Plugins

There were 3 new plugins released:

  • grails-ant version 0.1.1. Provides Ant to Grails applications
  • sms version 0.1. Provides services to access Torpedeiro HTTP/S API
  • sipgate version 1.0.0. Allows you to send SMS via the SMS-Gateway sipgate.de

and 19 updated plugins:

  • avatar version 0.5. Provides a taglib for displaying avatars
  • bubbling version 2.1.3. Provides integration with the Bubbling Library YUI extension
  • ckeditor version 3.6.0.0. Implements the integration layer between Grails and the CKEditor web rich text editor.
  • cloud-foundry-ui version 1.0. Provides a basic monitoring UI for Cloud Foundry applications
  • dynamic-config version 0.3. Change config properties without restarting the application
  • equals-hashcode-test version 0.1.1. Base Spock specification for testing equals and hashCode methods of domain classes and other Groovy objects
  • functional-test-development version 0.1.8. Installs a script, develop-functional-tests, that you can use to develop your functional tests more conveniently
  • gpars version 0.2. Adds GPars jar files to Grails projects
  • grails-melody version 1.5. Integrates the JavaMelody system monitoring tool
  • grails-ui version 1.2. Provides a standard UI tag library for ajaxy widgets using YUI
  • lesscss-resources version 0.3. Optimises the use of http://www.lesscss.org css files, compiling .less files into their .css counterprt, and place the css into the processing chain to be available to the other resource plugin features
  • portlets version 0.8. Aims to provide a simple way of developing JSR-168 portlets
  • portlets-gatein version 0.2. Provides a simple way of deploying Grails portlets to JBoss GateIN 3.1 Portal
  • portlets-liferay version 0.3. Uses the Portlets Plugin and adds Liferay Portal specific configurations and adapters
  • rateable version 0.7.0. Adds a generic mechanism for rating domain objects
  • scala version 0.6.2. Allows you to compile Scala sources in the /src/java and /src/scala folders of your application
  • tiny-mce version 3.4.2. Integrates the TinyMce editor javascript and tags to embed the editor in your GSP pages
  • translate version 1.1. Translates text from one language to another using the Google Translate API
  • yui version 2.8.2. Provides integration with the Yahoo! UI Library

Interesting Tweets

Jobs

User groups and Conferences

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