25 January 2016
This is a two week edition, as I was busy visiting India and especially GR8Conf India last week. What a couple of weeks, the Groovy Ecosystem is indeed alive as the amount of news will reveal.
The Grails team at OCI have released Grails 3.0.12,
with some significant startup time improvements, due to a change in classes scanned at the classpath. Read the
release notes for hints on
upgrading.
The second release candidate of Grails 3.1.0.RC2 is also ready, where the Release Notes
reveals better profile support, a new angularJS profile, GORM 5 suite and much more.
Along with Grails 3.1, the deprecated filters support will be removed, but may find its way into a plugin. Jeff Scott Brown was searching for
someone to make a contribution for this. The task is Pull Filters Support Out Of Core And Into Separate Plugin,
including the removed code in
this project, removed from core here.
The heroes of the week must be Matt Sheehan, Eric Helgeson and Bobby Warner for building a plugin portal for Grails 3 plugins: grails-plugins.org. It comes with better searching and sorting than the bintray page.
Sapan Parikh has made a sample application using the new AngulaeJS profile for Grails 3.1, demoing routing with a controller.
The GPars project for concurrency and parallelism has an updated website, which is really cool looking (and a huge upgrade from the old): http://gpars.website
The first release candidate for Gradle 2.11-rc-1 is ready. Improvements continue for the new software model and continuous build. Also Gradle related; you should follow @DailyGradle on twitter for tips on using Gradle, by Schalk Cronjé.
On SDKMan, all the above releases are of course available, and also Ant is now a candidate.
Even better, the switch extension command, that automatically detects a projects Grails or Griffon version is now also working
for Grails 3, thanks to a pull request by Ronny Løvtangen (hero of the week #2)
In the Groovy world, Guillaume has answered a couple of good questions on Quora:
The first Ratpack book is now complete! Sorry Dan Woods you were not fast enough, Mr Haki's
Ratpacked Notebook
is available on leanpub
Ken and Baruch gave Dan a hard time in the latest Groovy Podcast,
ignoring the time it takes them between podcasts ;) It is however as always fun to listen to.
Dan Woods says "Learning Ratpack" is on schedule for a March publish
In other book related news, Kostis Kapelonis, the author of "Java Testing with Spock" points out errata should be posted here.
GR8Conf EU and Gradle will bring a Gradle miniSummit to Copenhagen on June 1st-3rd. The call for paper is still open, for both GR8Conf EU, GR8Conf US and a new mini conference in Warsaw, the GR8Day Warsaw on March 19th.
For Greach, there is one week left for buying early bird tickets.
This year I had the pleasure of visiting GR8Conf India for the first time. It is also the first time with that name, as the conference was called Grailsconf before.
It is an excellent venue, organised perfectly by a the crew from To the New Digital. Roni and Manoj reminded everyone in their opening speach that conferences are a
great oportunity to network and meet new people.
This was the first time Burt Beckwith gave a keynote at a conference! With some historic insights into the Grails project, and his take on the 'State of the Union' of Grails.
The event was in two tracks, both live streamed on the #fame app, that Himanshu Seth also gave a great presentation on, and had thousinds of viewers. The event was a mix of Indian and foreign speakers, including Burt, Paul King, Søren Glasius, Naresha K and myself. I've collected some of the slides and material below, and the talks should be available on Youtube at a later point in time.
In all ways, GR8Conf India exceeded my expectations! And I had not figured that it was at the speakers dinner I would learn a new ritual: The Captains Game, but it was fun. I'm not the only one impressed, see the following reviews:
The Slides etc. from GR8COnf India are here