Grails Diary - Week 4 in 2014

26 January 2014

Lari from the Grails team ask for feedback on which unit testing improvements should be included in the Grails 2.4 version, please vote on the issues in Jira ( More info).

The new Gr8conf EU 2014 site is finally ready; Check it out here

Guillaume Laforge has tried to calculate the yearly downloads of the Groovy language, and in 2013 it crosses the 3 million downloads a year mark. Congrats to the Groovy team! And this is not including Groovy included in Grails og Gradle builds!

The Gvm tool was featured in Tools and Methods, you can support it by voting it up here

If you are a fan of Spock test framework, there seems to be several books under way, David Dawson and Rob Fletcher are both writing.

Please remember that it is the season for submitting sessions for several GR8Conf (Eu and US), Greach, and Spring one 2GX

Videos of presentations

Blogs, articles, etc.

New Plugins

Updated Plugins

  • Grails Mongo Jodatime Plugin Persists Joda Time types to a Mongo database (using mongodb)
  • 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 FilterPane Plugin This plugin adds automatic and customizable filtering capabilities to any Grails application's list views.
  • jQuery for Grails Provides integration for the jQuery library with Grails JavascriptProvider
  • Grails Application Version Update Plugin Provides a more friendly way to update your application version.
  • Ajax Dependancy Selection Plugin Defines next auto completion/selection form field values ensuring it is bound on previous auto completed/selected form field. This can be used on two or more objects of hasMany and belongsTo. Provides: g:autocomplete, g:autoCompletePrimary, g:autoCompleteSecondary, g:autoCompleteSecondaryNR, g:selectPrimary, g:selectSecondary , g:selectSecondaryNR & g:selectController.
  • Grails Plugin Config Plugin Simplifies plugin configuration tasks
  • Remote SSH Plugin Uses the Ganymed SSH-2 library to provide RemoteSSH, RemoteSCP, RemoteSCPDir, and RemoteSCPGet
  • Cxf Client - Support for Soap Service Endpoints Used for easily calling soap web services. Provides wsdl2java grails target to easily generate code into src/java from configured cxf clients. Ability to dynamically update endpoint at runtime.
  • I18nEnums Grails Plugin Adds an enumeration usable on Enums to easy add and implement the MessageSourceResolvable interface
  • Build Test Data Plugin Enables the easy creation of test data by automatic inspection of constraints. Any properties that are required havetheir constraints examined and a value is automatically provided for them.
  • Spring Security Event Log A plugin to log Spring Security events
  • OAuth2 Provider support for the Spring Security plugin. OAuth2 Provider support for the Spring Security plugin.
  • Jasper Plugin Adds easy support for launching jasper reports from GSP pages. After installing, run your application and request (app-url)/jasper/demo for a demonstration and instructions.
  • Bridges Weceem authentication to Spring Security Provides the glue needed to make Weceem plugin use Spring Security for authorisation and authentication. Your application still needs to configure Spring-Security however. The domain class is expected to include "email" property.
  • Sentry Client Plugin Sentry Client for Grails
  • JSR 311 plugin A plugin that supports the development of RESTful web services based on theJava API for RESTful Web Services (JSR 311: JAX-RS). It is targeted atdevelopers who want to structure the web service layer of an application ina JSR 311 compatible way but still want to continue to use Grails' powerfulfeatures such as GORM, automated XML and JSON marshalling, Grails services,Grails filters and so on. This plugin is an alternative to Grails' built-inmechanism for implementing RESTful web services.At the ...
  • Stripe Plugin for using Stripe to process credit card transactions.

Interesting Tweets

  • @kyleboongradle plugins make publishing #asciidoctor to github pages a snap
  • @richardadaltonIf carpenters were hired like programmers: "Must have at least 5 years experience with the Dewalt 18V 165mm Circular Saw"
  • @gr8conf Thanks goes to @lightsabersd, @aagnie and @jonbomme for their GR8 work on the #gr8conf website http://bit.ly/Ahht3g
  • @mittie I wish there was at least ONE conference where we discussed the responsibility of developers for our society.
  • @tomaslin Is there a "effective scala" ( http://twitter.github.io/effectivescala/ ) type document for groovy / grails development? ( Aside from http://groovy.codehaus.org/Groovy+style+and+language+feature+guidelines+for+Java+developers )
  • @tim_yates Using 2 keyboards + consistently typing on the wrong one and screwing up two lots of code. Guess this is what it feels like to be a thread?
  • @akeelrehman #Grails support of #REST is amazing, never seen similar capabilities in other framework. Excited to implment in my next project. #API #JSON
  • @karan_shah A project that would take 4 months was completed in 4 weeks. Deployed Grails and Java apps using @CloverETL to @awscloud last week
  • @tim_yatesIdiosyncrasies of Groovy's with method and null values https://gist.github.com/timyates/8561373 #groovylang
  • @CedricChampeauI wish the new #groovylang documentation task was finished. But we are still far :(
  • @dnscollective Programming is the art of knowing when to use google, when to ask for help, and when to go for a walk around the block.
  • @rfletcherEW “I was against Groovy adding static typing… I was completely wrong, it’s the best thing that ever happened to the language” – @ldaley

Conferences and meetups

G48, global, Feb. 28th - March 2nd , 2014
Greach, Madrid - Spain, March 28th -29th, 2014 (CFP until jan. 31st).
GR8conf Europe, Copenhagen - Denmark, June 2nd -4th, 2014 (CFP until feb. 1st).
SOTR - Scotch on the Rocks, Edinburg, June 5th - 6th, 2014
GR8conf US, Minneapolis - USA, July 28th-29th, 2014 (CFP until feb. 1st).
SpringOne 2GX 2014, Dallas - USA, September 8th - 11th, 2014 (CFP).
Groovy Grails Exchange, London - GB, December 12th - 13th, 2014