Grails Diary - Week 47

27 November 2013

Week 47 was a GR8 (and busy) week in the community!

The Groovy team released version 2.2 with a bunch of cool features.

Likewise, the Grails team released version 2.3.3 , fixing a bunch of bugs, and a handfull of new improvements.

Both releases made MrHaki explode on the Goodness blog, giving examples and use cases for lots of the new features (links below).

Blogs, articles, videos etc.

New Plugins

  • Quick Search Plugin Search plugin for domain class properties. Lightweight plugin which puts the ability for searching, it adds utility functions for building the search result into a string format representation sufficient for auto-complete as well as functions for listing the results based on the search query.
  • Fat Cow Icons Plugin Bundles free icons from http://www.fatcow.com and provides a handful of convenient taglibs that create asynchronous buttons out of the icons.This plugin started as a clone of the grails-glyph-icons plugin with some adaptations.
  • Redis Flexible Cache Plugin This plugin is an alternative to redis-cache-plugin. It gives the possibility to set the expire time in seconds for every cached key, and provides a service, annotations and injected methods to perform entry caching and eviction. The redis-plugin plugin also provides the possibility to set a TTL for a cached entry (using the provided @Memoize annotation), but it lacks the option to serialize any kind of Serializable objects (only object ids are cached and then hydrated from main DB). This means ...
  • Grails Timetravel Plugin Provides utility methods to set custom dateCreated and lastUpdated timpestamped dates on your domain objects
  • Class Domain UML Plugin Automagically create a UML diagram from all your domain classes of your Grails app

Updated Plugins

  • Optimus Plugin Grails Optimus Plugin
  • Glass Plugin The Grails Glass Plugin allows you to quickly develop Grails apps for the upcoming Google Glass platform, via the Mirror API. 
  • Lightweight Deploy Plugin This plugin is intended to produce a lightweight, deployable grails application. It embeds jetty, and uses a number of the conventions from Dropwizard that make sense. 
  • Mock authentication support for Spring Security Mock authentication support for Spring Security
  • Test Code Coverage Plugin Creates Code Coverage reports for your code
  • Standalone Tomcat Redis Plugin Uses Redis as the Tomcat session manager when using the Tomcat server
  • MongoDB GORM A plugin that integrates the Mongo document datastore into Grails, providing a GORM API onto it
  • Grails Apache Nutch alternative Very simple alternative to Apache Nutch created i
  • JavaMelody Grails Plugin Integrate JavaMelody Monitoring into grails application.
  • Neo4j GORM A plugin that integrates the Neo4j graph database into Grails, providing a GORM API onto it
  • ElasticSearch GORM Plugin An alternative Elasticsearch plugin for Grails. Based on, but unlike the original, this implementation aims to be DB agnostic.
  • jaces - ultimate companion to create rich client forms, lists, grids. jaces is a extension to dijit for writing less and simplier code for form handling, listing items, adding records and updating them.
  • Asset Pipeline Plugin The Asset-Pipeline is a plugin used for managing and processing static assets in Grails applications. Asset-Pipeline functions include processing and minification of both CSS and JavaScript files. It is also capable of being extended to compile custom static assets, such as CoffeeScript.
  • Cookie Session Plugin The Cookie Session plugin enables grails applications to store session data in http cookies between requests instead of in memory on the server. This allows application deployments to be more stateless which supports simplified scaling architectures and fault tolerance.
  • JQuery Validation UI Plugin - Client Side Validation without writing JavaScript JQuery Validation UI Plugin - Client Side Validation without writing JavaScript
  • Grails Postgresql Extensions Plugin This plugin provides support for Postgresql Native Types like Arrays, HStores, JSON,…
  • jQuery for Grails Provides integration for the jQuery library with Grails JavascriptProvider
  • Nimble Nimble is an extensive application base environment for Grails.
  • Apache Tomcat plugin for Grails Makes Tomcat 7.0 the default servlet container for Grails at development time.
  • Hibernate 3 for Grails Provides integration between Grails and Hibernate 3 through GORM
  • Hibernate 4 for Grails Provides integration between Grails and Hibernate 4 through GORM
  • Audit Logging Plugin Automatically log change events for domain objects.The Audit Logging plugin adds an instance hook to domain objects that allows you to hangAudit events off of them. 
  • OohLaLog Plugin Grails Oohlalog Log4j Appender for Passing logs to the oohlalog API.
  • Grails AWS Plugin Amazon Web Services (AWS) grails plugin provides easy access to simpler functions of AWS
  • iCalendar Plug-in This plugin contains a builder to easily convert your event into the iCalendar format. The plugin hooks replaces each render method that uses the contentType 'text/calendar'.
  • Kickstart with Bootstrap - Good looking websites! Kickstart is a plugin for Grails to start your project with a good looking frontend. It provides adapted scaffolding templates for standard CRUD pages using the Bootstrap frontend framework initiated by Twitter.
  • Grails Direct Messages Plugin Grails plugin for direct messages between users. Allows two messages styles.One, similar to twitter or facebook direct messages, that is, all the messages between two users form a unique conversation.Other, similar to gmail, all the messages can have a subject, and the messages between two users with the same subjectform a unique conversation.

Interesting Tweets

Conferences and meetups

Groovy Grails Exchange, London, December 12th - 13th, 2013
G48, global, Feb. 28th - March 2nd , 2014
Greach, Spain, Feb. /March, 2014
GR8conf Europe, Copenhagen, June 2nd -4th, 2014
SOTR - Scotch on the Rocks, Edinburg, June 5th - 6th, 2014
GR8conf US, Minneapolis, USA, July, 2014
SpringOne 2GX 2014, Dallas, USA, September 8th - 11th, 2014