Archive for July, 2011

This Week in Grails (2011-29)

Sunday, July 24th, 2011

Looks like last week was a bit of a fluke since this week was a lot busier than usual – 5 new plugins and 17 updated, and 22(!) jobs. I guess the vacations are over 🙂

The fifth Groovy & Grails eXchange was announced this week. It will be December 8th and 9th in London and the price is only £195 until August 30 so be sure to register early. I went two years ago and had a great time – I highly recommend going.

Groovy 1.8.1 and the first beta of 1.9 were released this week. There are a few Java 7 features implemented in 1.9, and 1.8 has more performance optimizations for primitives, plus other new features and bug fixes.

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 5 new plugins released:

  • coffeescript-resources version 0.2. Create coffeescript modules that automatically compiles on every file change with jCoffeeScript
  • jetty-standalone version 0.2. Allows you to easily deploy an application as a standalone web application
  • spock-grails-env-extensions version 0.1. Spock extensions that allow to execute and ignore tests for given Grails environments.
  • jslider version 0.1. Supplies jSlider resources
  • plugin-config version 0.1. Simplifies plugin configuration tasks

and 17 updated plugins:

  • apns version 0.5.3. Apple Push Notification Service Integration
  • batch-launcher version 0.5.5. Load and run batch (non-webapp) Grails applications
  • extjs4 version 4.0.2a.0. Provides Ext JS 4 resources
  • freemarker-tags version 0.7.1. Use Grails Dynamic Tag Libraries as Freemarker directives
  • fsm version 0.6.2. Finite State Machine behavior
  • google-analytics version 1.0. Provides a simple taglib to embed Google Analytics pageview tracking to your Grails application
  • ic-alendar version 0.3.2. Export event data in the iCalendar format
  • lesscss-resources version 0.4. 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
  • mongodb-morphia version 0.5.4. Alternative MongoDB GORM based on the Morphia library (former gorm-mongodb)
  • release version 1.0.0.RC1. Publishes Grails plugins either to a public or private repository
  • routing version 1.1.3. Send and route messages to a wide variety of destination endpoints directly from your Controllers and Services using Camel
  • routing-jms version 1.1.3. JMS integration for the grails-routing plugin
  • screencasts version 0.5.3. Allows the upload, management and display of screencasts
  • searchable version 0.6.1. Adds rich search functionality to Grails domain models
  • shopping-cart version 0.5. Provides generic shopping cart functionality
  • taggable version 0.6.4. Adds support for associating tags with domain classes
  • ulc version 0.3.4. Provides access to the Canoo UltraLightClient (ULC) RIA kit

Interesting Tweets

Jobs

User groups and Conferences

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This Week in Grails (2011-28)

Monday, July 18th, 2011

This week was a bit quieter than previous, I suppose due to vacations and other summer-related distractions. One place that has seen a steady stream of activity is stackoverflow.com. The questions tagged with Grails and Groovy have increased quite a bit in the past few months.

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 4 new plugins released:

  • gchimp version 0.2.6. An interface for the MailChimp 1.2. API
  • jesque version 0.1. Groovier approach to using jesque
  • jesque-web version 0.1. Web interface to view and manage jesque queues, jobs and workers
  • rollback-on-exception version 0.1. Initiate rollback on any exception in a grails service marked as transactional.

and 10 updated plugins:

  • cloud-foundry version 1.0.1. Integrates Cloud Foundry’s cloud deployment services to manage the running of Grails applications in the cloud from the command line
  • cloud-foundry-ui version 1.0.1. Provides a basic monitoring UI for Cloud Foundry applications
  • constraints version 0.6.0. Allows you to create custom domain Constraints for validating Domain objects
  • force-response-download version 0.1.2. Forces the browser to open a dialog for downloading content produced within controller actions
  • freemarker-tags version 0.7.0. Use Grails Dynamic Tag Libraries as Freemarker directives
  • grails-melody version 1.6. Integrates the JavaMelody system monitoring tool
  • remote-pagination version 0.2.6. Provides tags for pagination and to sort columns without page refresh using Ajax and loads only the list of objects needed
  • serializable-session version 0.3. Enforces that the session will only accept serializable objects
  • twitter4j version 0.2. Send and receive Twitter messages using the twitter4j library
  • viaboxx-dbmigrate version 1.3.0. Setup and migrate the database of your project

Interesting Tweets

Jobs

User groups and Conferences

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This Week in Grails (2011-27)

Sunday, July 10th, 2011

STS 2.7.0 was released this week and it has lots of new features of interest to Groovy and Grails developers: support for Grails 1.4.M1, Grails-aware rename refactoring, Groovy-Eclipse 2.5.1 (including support for Groovy 1.8 and DSLDs), and support for Gradle. It also is now based on Eclipse 3.7 and comes with EGit 1.0.

Congratulations to the Weceem team for their 1.0 release.

I released a new plugin this week that lets you build a runnable JAR from a Grails application with an embedded Tomcat 7 server so you can run your application with java -jar standalone.jar. Check out the blog post for more information.

I stumbled across a site that contains several Groovy screencasts, groovycasts.org. That’s definitely one to add to your RSS reader.

Also I’ve added a new permalink in the Jobs section, a search for SpringSource jobs at jobs.vmware.com. There are currently 47 open positions around the world (unfortunately far too few are Groovy or Grails related).

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 2 new plugins released:

  • quartz-monitor version 0.1. One clear and concise page that enables you to administer all your Quartz jobs
  • standalone version 1.0. Runs a Grails application as a JAR file with an embedded Tomcat server

and 6 updated plugins:

  • db-stuff version 0.4.0. DB schema managment and data import/export
  • export version 1.0. Export domain objects to a variety of formats (CSV, Excel, ODS, PDF, RTF and XML)
  • i18n-fields version 0.5.2. Provides a declarative way of localizing domain classes’ fields for different languages
  • mongodb-morphia version 0.7.3. Alternative MongoDB GORM based on the Morphia library (former gorm-mongodb)
  • sharding version 0.5. Defines multiple database shards to horizontally scale data
  • weceem version 1.0. A content management system

Interesting Tweets

User groups and Conferences

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New grails-standalone plugin

Saturday, July 09th, 2011

I noticed a while back looking at open Grails issues that there was an interesting one about running a Grails application as a standalone jar, GRAILS-99. Jenkins has this option and uses Winstone but I wasn’t able to get it completely working with a Grails application. It would start up and serve the index GSP but controller-based actions just showed a blank page. It might have been fixable, but the project hasn’t been updated since 2008 and I didn’t want to invest a lot of time on this so I did it a bit more manually using Tomcat.

I took the same approach as Winstone, i.e. creating a JAR with a Main-class entry in the manifest for a class that extracts an embedded WAR file to a temporary folder and uses a servlet container to host the application. I’m using Tomcat 7.0.16 and borrowed a lot of code from the Tomcat plugin. There’s a Gant script (build-standalone) which builds a WAR (or uses an existing one if specified) and builds the JAR by expanding the five Tomcat jars and adding the WAR and the launcher class.

There are a few configuration options, but the simplest workflow is to run

grails build-standalone

in your project directory, which creates target/standalone.jar, and then run

java -jar standalone.jar

and the application will be running at http://localhost:8080.

The plugin portal page is here, the full docs are here and the source is here. Report issues and suggestions on the User mailing list.

grails, grailsplugin, tomcat | Comments (3)

This Week in Grails (2011-26)

Sunday, July 03rd, 2011

GR8 Conf US was this week in Minneapolis. It was a lot of fun, and another chance to meet people I’d only previously known online (both users and speakers) and talk about what’s going on in the real world. I was able to spend some time in Minneapolis (the conference was actually a little south of the city in Bloomington) and was almost starting to think that I could live in a place like Minneapolis, until I remembered what the weather is like there in January.

I thought I was breaking the news that Grails 1.4 had been renamed to 2.0 when I announced it, only to be told that Graeme had posted the news on the mailing list 27 minutes earlier 🙂

There was a lot of Twitter activity during the conference (search the #gr8conf hashtag), and here are some of the more interesting ones:

As usual there are interesting jobs to check out, but in particular there’s one at a company here in the Boston area, and one in Hawaii(!). And I happened to check out the SpringSourceJob Twitter feed that I have permalinked below and there’s very cool position open (not Grails or Groovy related unfortunately) in Cambridge using Java, Flex, BlazeDS working with the Mobile Virtualization Platform.

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 2 new plugins released:

and 12 updated plugins:

  • avatar version 0.5.2. Provides a taglib for displaying avatars
  • batch-launcher version 0.5.3. Load and run batch (non-webapp) Grails applications
  • codenarc version 0.14. Static code analysis for Groovy
  • equals-hashcode-test version 0.2.0. Base Spock specification for testing equals and hashCode methods of domain classes and other Groovy objects
  • executor version 0.3. Enables the Java concurrency Executor Framework for asynchronous processing
  • flash-helper version 0.8. Simplifies and standardizes the process of adding/reading messages in the flash scope
  • geb version 0.6.0. Geb is a library for headless web browsing on the JVM, suitable for automation and functional web testing
  • grails-ant version 0.1.2. Provides Ant to Grails applications
  • grails-yui-widget version 0.1.1. Create YUI Widgets via TagLibs
  • i18n-fields version 0.5.1. Provides a declarative way of localizing domain classes’ fields for different languages
  • release version 1.0.0.M3. Publishes Grails plugins either to a public or private repository
  • tiny-mce version 3.4.3.1. Integrates the TinyMce editor javascript and tags to embed the editor in your GSP pages

Interesting Tweets

User groups and Conferences

grails, grailsplugin, groovy, java, ThisWeekInGrails | Comments Off on This Week in Grails (2011-26)

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