Grails Diary - Week 7 in 2016

Apache Groovy 2.4.6 has been released! And this release has solved a whooping 59 bugs, improved the documentation, and a number of general improvements around StreamingJsonBuilder, error-message for AST transformation, closures generated as public classes and more. See the change log for the full list of issues fixed. As always, the easiest way to upgrade is to use Sdkman, where Groovy 2.4.6 is already available.

Cedric Champeau is using the #ThankAnOpenSourceContributorFriday tag on Twitter, which is a great thing. He however recently rediscover the Groovy FileTreeBuilder, for generating a file directory structure - and found out he had written it himself!. I had not seen it before, but can think of a couple of times it could have helped me in the past! Thank you Cedric for this!

The Grails Slack channel now have way more than 1500 members. If you still have not joined, you can do it at slack-signup.grails.org.

Should Spock Framework have a real logo? Participate in the survey by Søren Berg Glasius, to determine if a Kickstarter project should be initiated.

Several great answers have been posted on Quora this week. Rob Fletcher has answered: What are some tips, tricks and gotchas when using Spock Framework for testing? , Robert Dobbes has replied to What are the pros and cons of Apache Groovy?, and Guilaume Laforge has taken care of What is the purpose of 'def ' in Groovy programming language?.

The Betamax project, started by Rob Fletcher, used for recording and replaying external Web APIs has a new website betamax.software, and sees a bit of love from new contributors.

Ratpack 1.2.0 is now officially released, with lots of new inprovements described in the version description. The Ratpack team expects bi-monthly minor releases in the future, and the framework has reached 1000 stars on GitHub!

Craig Burke is taking on the Javascript dependency resolution war, with his Gradle plugin to install from Npm or Bower, without NodeJs, the documentation is at GitHub in the repo and the plugin is in the Gradle Plugin Portal

The "Java Testing with Spock" book by Konstantinos Kapelonis is close to the release on Amazon, and available for pre-order.

Oh, and so there should be no doubt: #unfollowdanveloper. Thank you Groovy Podcast for the reprimand.

The registration for the one day event: Warsaw GR8 Day is open

Podcasts and Videos of Presentations

Groovy Podcast Ep. 23 (Ken Kousin and Baruch Sadogursky live from DevNexus 2016)
Gradle Plugin Basics (Annyce Davis)

Blogs, Articles, etc.

Easy Database Manipulation with Groovy and Gradle (Steve Perkins)
Grails Tips: How to install new Relic in a Grails 3 app? (Sergio del Amo)
How to force IntelliJ IDEA to run Grails tests in the Test Environment (Sergio del Amo)
Grails Tips: Increase Heap Space when running run-app in Grails 3 app (Sergio del Amo)
Grails Tips: How to customize the war name generated by “grails war” command? (Sergio del Amo)
Gradle Goodness: Build Script Using Java Syntax (Hubert Klein Ikkink aka MrHaki)
Don't be Careless With Groovy (Un)checked Exceptions (Marcin Pilaczynski)
Gradle Goodness: Create Objects Using DSL With Domain Object Containers (Hubert Klein Ikkink aka MrHaki)
Gradle Goodness: Using Nested Domain Object Containers (Hubert Klein Ikkink aka MrHaki)
Gradle Goodness: Running Groovy Scripts Using Groovy Command Line (Hubert Klein Ikkink aka MrHaki)
Multi-Project AspectJ Builds With Gradle and Eclipse ( Jaime Metcher)
Groovy Calamari - Issue 26 (Sergio del Amo)

Updated Grails 3 Plugins

wschat (3.014) Grails wschat plugin
quartz (2.0.6) Grails quartz plugin
slack (3.0.0) Grails Slack Integration Plugin
scaffolding (3.2.1) Grails scaffolding plugin

Updated Grails 2 Plugins

GR8 CRM Campaign Management User Interface This plugin is a companion plugin to crm-campaign, a plugin part of the GR8 CRM plugin suite. It contains a Twitter Bootstrap based user interface for campaign management.
GR8 CRM Campaign Services This plugin provide storage and services for managing campaigns in GR8 CRM based applications. A campaign is something that has a message and a target group, for example an email campaign, a product discount or a web site banner. Custom plugins can provide other campaign types with Grails artifacts.
UberDoc - Rest-API Documentation uberDoc is a very simple solution for creating API documentation based on annotations in domain objects and controllers, and Grails' messag

Interesting Tweets

@jitpack Even quicker Gradle builds on JitPack - caching Gradle distribution to avoid re-download. Thanks to @sdkmanager!
@gradle Watch the video: how to manage #Jenkins environment using #Gradle http://buff.ly/1WqwuyA
@RalfDMueller Got a @grailsframework app up and running with @jenkinsci on @openshift ! Grails rocks!
@oscon You can mix Groovy w/ Java class-by-class or even line-by-line. Learn more w/ @kenkousen in a free webcast March 29: http://oreil.ly/1ornq1B
@craigburke1 It feels so wrong, but the fact that #groovylang lets me access private fields within a class can be so damn handy in pinch.
@gradle Catch @bmuschko slides from #SpringOne2gx Building a #ContinuousDelivery Pipeline with #Gradle and #Jenkins http://buff.ly/1SRqcKJ
@CedricChampeau "lets you use #Groovy expressions in Evaluate and Watch windows when debugging Java application" Nice! https://twitter.com/intellijidea/status/700717844745449472
@antonarhipov An Introduction to #JRebel and #Grails http://buff.ly/1oPjIzm #groovy
@CedricChampeau I'm amazed by the number of tweets in Japanese about #gradle. I wish I could read them.
@MGrzejszczak We've got an official Twitter handle for @gr8day_warsaw conference! Follow it, visit http://warsaw.gr8days.pl and cfp http://cfp.gr8conf.org
@c0sin @danveloper @glaforge You'd be surprised how deeply @ApacheGroovy is rooted into #FOSS projects. E.g. Apache Data stack @ASFbigtop, etc.
@Lspacewalker @danveloper probably the reason why Groovy has a quiet adoption, it just works
@gradle Ticketmaster: Android Gradle Success Story for Android developers who are looking for some inspiration around Gradle http://buff.ly/1oI4R9E
@DailyGradle For application plugin, get use to using ‘installDist’ task rather than ‘installApp’. Later will be removed in Gradle 3.0 #gradleTip
@svpember Ratpack 1.2 (https://ratpack.io/versions/1.2.0) is out & I’m oddly most excited about the updated Pac4j integration: authentication AND authorization
@madridgug "@grailsframework 3: SpringBoot on Steroids". En #SpringMadridUG por @alvaro_sanchez. No te la pierdas! http://www.meetup.com/es-ES/madrid-spring-user-group/events/227937890/
@gradle Have a look at Gretty the Gradle web plugin that allows you to run various apps on multi containers:http://buff.ly/1SRqiSK
@JennStrater Success!! I have my first example endpoint running with #springrestdocs and #grailsfw :)
@angelmbanks @sjmaple: #groovy = #java supercharged. #JVM #devnexus
@danveloper Have had amazing and excellent feedback from the technical reviewers of "Learning Ratpack”. Feeling very privileged to have their insights.
@MGrzejszczak Over the weekend I've created a small library for asserting JSONs (jsonassert). Maybe you'll find it handy! https://github.com/marcingrzejszczak/jsonassert
@sbglasius Working on #gr8conf eu agenda with @glaforge - lots of fun, but too many talks, so hard to pick a great show! Thanks for all the submissions

Conferences and meetups

Groovy & Grails Training , - Minneapolis, MN, February 24th - 26th, 2016
GR8Day Warsaw 2016, Warsaw - Poland, March 19th, 2016 - CFP is open!
Webcast: Seriously, Use Groovy NOW, Online, March 29th, 2016
Greach, Madrid - Spain, April 8th & 9th, 2016
Spring I/O, Barcelona - Spain, May 19th - 20th, 2016
GR8conf Europe & Gradle miniSummit, Copenhagen - Denmark, June 1st -3rd, 2016.
Gradle Summit, Palo Alto - CA, June 23rd -24th, 2016.
GR8conf US, Minneapolis - USA, July 27th - 29th, 2016.
G3 Summit , Fort Lauderdale - USA, November 27th - December 1st, 2016.- CFP is open!