This Week in Grails

Update: Check out the Chinese translation

I tend to see a lot of Grails and Groovy related items in my RSS reader, a couple of Twitter keyword searches, the Grails User mailing list, and miscellaneous other places, so I thought it’d be good to aggregate some of the useful and/or interesting items that I find each week to hopefully give them a little more visibility.

I also wrote a small Groovy script to find the most recent plugin releases and updates since they don’t always get announced.

Miscellaneous Items

• Upcoming Grails 1.3.6 release
  • The 1.3.6 release should be next week once testing is finished. There are lots of fixes and improvements in this release – check out the partially-finished release notes. The code is very stable at this point so you’d help us out a lot by installing the latest build from our CI server and testing it with your application and letting us know if there are any issues.
• Ted Naleid’s run-script
  • We had a request to add this cool script to the Grails core scripts and that will be released in 1.3.6. It makes it easy to run a Groovy script that access your domain classes, services, Spring beans, etc.
• MinuteProject 4 Grails
  • This is an interesting reverse engineering project that supports Grails and several other frameworks. I haven’t looked at it extensively yet but it looks like it does a lot of what my Database reverse engineering plugin does but also generates a scaffolded user interface.
• Updated Grails logging configuration documentation
  • Peter Ledbrook added a bunch of information to the logging configuration section of the Grails user manual and published a draft here
• GroovyTestCase uses java.util.logging.Logger
  • Integration tests typically extend GroovyTestCase which has a protected log variable. Unfortunately it turns out that this is is a java.util.logging.Logger but Grails uses Log4j, and this can cause logging statements to seem to disappear and cause confusion when running tests.
• Testing Closures in Groovy
  • This is an interesting post by Scott Vlaminck using a tracking delegate to help with testing Closures.
• SAP SDN Blog Reader for iPad, iPhone and Android devices
  • Blog post about using Grails to write a mobile feed reader application
• Grails 400 Retail Site
  • Developing a Grails e-commerce site using a DB2/400 database on an iSeries/AS400 box
• QuickHit is hiring
  • QuickHit is hiring a Grails lead developer in Foxboro, MA. They run a popular Grails-based site that hosts realtime football games using Flash.
• Updated STS Integration docs
  • The SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) integration documentation got a significant update this week.
• Mystery Grails site launch
  • Unfortunately I can’t share any details about this one, but a large web site went live this week with their site updated to be entirely Grails-based. It looks great and performance is fantastic. Hopefully more information will be forthcoming once they officially announce the update.
• Speaking of large sites using Grails …
  • Check out the SpringSource Case Studies page – it turns out that they had a bunch of Groovy and Grails related case studies that I hadn’t seen before.

Plugins

There were four new plugins released:

• ajaxflow version 0.1.8. Enables ajaxified webflows
• error-pages-fix version 0.2. Workaround for GRAILS-6992
  until Grails 1.4 is released
• full-calendar version 0.1.4. Adds support for the FullCalendar jQuery plugin
• twitter-checker version 0.1. Monitors Twitter for events including new followers and unfollows in your account, new RTs of you made by other users, and new mentions to you made by other users

There were also several updated plugins:

• activiti version 5.0. Integrates the Activiti BPM Suite and workflow system
• autobase version 0.10.0. This abandoned plugin has been picked up by new developers
• cassandra version 0.7.0.20101207. Provides access to Cassandra (not a GORM layer).
• dojo version 1.4.3.4. Adds the Dojo javascript toolkit.
• fsm version 0.6.4. Adds Finite State Machine behaviors to domain classes.
• gorm-mongodb version 0.5.4. Adds a GORM wrapper for MongoDB.
• jasper version 1.1.6.3. Enables use of JasperReports.
• localizations version 1.4.1. Stores I18N messages in the database.
• remoting version 1.2. Exposes Grails services over RMI, Hessian, Burlap, and Spring’s HttpInvoker protocols
• spreedly version 0.1.2. Provides access to the Spreedly online payment service API
• ulc version 0.3.1. Provides access to the Canoo UltraLightClient (ULC) RIA kit

In addition, I wanted to draw particular attention to one plugin update, the 1.0 release of the console plugin. This is one of my favorite plugins and I released an updated version yesterday and wrote up some notes here.

Update: Check out the Chinese translation I tend to see a lot of Grails and Groovy related items in my RSS reader, a couple of Twitter keyword searches, the Grails...

This entry was posted on Friday, December 10th, 2010 at 10:50pm and is filed under eclipse, 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.