Grails Diary - Week 21 and 22 in 2016 - The GR8Conf EU Edition

07 June 2016

While writing this two week edition of the Grails Diary, which includes a few items from GR8Conf EU, the vote for releasing Groovy 2.4.7 is in progress.

The Grails team at OCI runs their own release train, and have released version 3.1.8 with bugfixes, and the first milestone release for 3.2.0. Grails 3.2 will include RxGORM, build on top of RxJava and providing a completely non-blocking, stateless implementation of GORM, currently only supported by MongoDB. It also comes with an updated AngularJS profile having AngularJS Scaffolding, and updates to JSON Views.

Gradle is currently on the 4th release candidate of version 2.14, and brings us faster builds, a more robust daemon and a deprecation of Java 6 as the highlights.

One of my favorite Gradle plugins, the shadow plugin by John Engelmann for generating fat jars has been updated, so version 1.2.3 is compatible with the release candidate of Gradle 2.14

Idiomatic Gradle by Schalk Cronjé now have a vol 2. Both can be found at leanpub and they come at a special bundled price.

One of the new features comming in version 1.4 of Ratpack is Retrofit integration. Danny Hyun from the core team gave a nice presentation on Ratpack at GR8Conf EU, and he published notes on Rapid Ratpack Groovy Web App Development

"Learning Ratpack” is finished and sent of to print. Great book by Dan Woods, and you can find the code samples from the book.

David E. Jones published an article on How to Make Groovy as Fast as Java , where he also reveals that the Moqui Framework is written in Groovy.

A few high profiles from the Groovy Ecosystem are changing jobs. Guillaume Laforge has just started at Google, as Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform and Marco Vermuelen will join Gradle. Congrats to Guilaume, Marco, Google and Gradle!

GR8Conf EU 2016 is in the books! My personal thanks go to all the great attendees, the speakers and the rest of the crew. My feeling is that this have been one of the best GR8Conf EU's that I've attended. Some of my personal highlights from this year was the keynote by Ken Kousen. Ken did a great and entertaining performance, adressing Gradle's affair with Kotlin, and encouraged everyone to become a little more of a Groovy Advocate, as there are many quiet success stories.
I saw a lot of great talks, but the best one was "Interesting nooks and crannies of Spock you (may) have never seen before" by Marcin Zaj?czkowski. I have worked with Spock for quite a few years, but Marcin provided lots of great tips and tricks from the cornercases of Spock.
Jochen did a great job of explaining the challenges of joint compilation, Danny Hyun livecoding Ratpack webservice and have shared his great notes, the Hackergarden led by Andres Almiray was a great success, and in general it was great to speak to so many cool people from the Groovy Ecosystem.
As there was three tracks this year, I missed more than 2/3 of the talks. But hopefully the videos will turn out fine, and I can see a couple of extra ones there.
On the Groovy side, we also learned that there is work in progress on the new Groovy parser grammer, and there are intentions to support the JAVA lambda syntax.
Below is some of the slides that the speakers have shared

 

Slides from GR8Conf EU

Podcasts and Videos of Presentations

Blogs, Articles, etc.

New Grails 3 Plugins

  • alexa-skills (0.1.0) This is a Grails 3.x plugin to help make Amazon Alexa Skills / Speechlets
  • views-json-templates (1.1.0.M2) Grails views-json-templates plugin
  • rx-mongodb (6.0.0.M1) GORM - Grails Data Access Framework
  • handlebars-renderer (0.1.2) Grails handlebars templates renderer plugin
  • angular-scaffolding (1.0.0.M1) Provides scaffolding for AngularJS 1.x applications
  • compass-asset-pipeline (2.9.1) Provides Compass/SCSS Build support using the jruby runtime. Any compass project can be adjusted to be built by the asset-pipeline and used in ?

Updated Grails 3 Plugins

  • coffee-asset-pipeline (2.9.1) Easily process coffee-script files with the asset-pipeline plugin. Package includes both jvm coffee runtime as well as the ability to use the c?
  • sass-asset-pipeline (2.9.1) Provides fast and easy .sass and .scss file support for Transpiling to CSS. This plugin takes advantage of jsass and libsass for maximum perfor?
  • handlebars-asset-pipeline (2.9.1) Provides native Handlebars file support in the asset-pipeline. Easily convert .hbs or .handlebars files into javascript template caches for use?
  • ember-asset-pipeline (2.9.1) Compiles hbs or handlebars files for the asset-pipeline into the Ember.TEMPLATES cache
  • less-asset-pipeline (2.9.1) LESS Compiler for the Asset-Pipeline
  • asset-pipeline-grails (2.9.1) The Asset-Pipeline is a plugin used for managing and processing static assets in Grails applications. Asset-Pipeline functions include processi?
  • grails3-cors-interceptor (1.1.0) Add Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) headers for Grails 3 applications.
  • seed-me (3.0.5) Implements a standard convention for adding seed data to your application..
  • i18n-javascript (0.4.2) Render all Grails i18n messages to Javascript
  • grails-twilio (0.1.2) Provides SMS sending capabilities to a Grails application.
  • redis-gorm (5.0.8) GORM - Grails Data Access Framework
  • neo4j (5.0.8) GORM - Grails Data Access Framework
  • mongodb (5.0.8) GORM for MongoDB
  • hibernate5 (5.0.8) GORM - Grails Data Access Framework
  • hibernate4 (5.0.8) GORM - Grails Data Access Framework
  • hibernate3 (5.0.8) GORM - Grails Data Access Framework
  • cassandra (5.0.8) GORM - Grails Data Access Framework
  • grails-views (1.1.0.M2) Grails Views
  • views-gradle (1.1.0.M2) Grails views-gradle plugin
  • novamail (0.1.1) The Novamail plug-in provides e-mail sending and retrieving capabilities to a Grails application. It is also capable of sending emails asynchro?
  • http-requests-grails (1.0.1) The HTTP Requests Plugin provides the http-requests library and artefacts for filters and converters.
  • babel-asset-pipeline (2.0.8) Babel.js transformation for Asset-pipeline
  • asynchronous-mail (2.0.0.RC3) The plugin realises asynchronous mail sending. It stores messages in a DB and sends them asynchronously by a quartz job.

New Grails 2 Plugins

  • Redis Console Plugin Simple Grails Redis console which can be used to execute commands that Jedis supports

Updated Grails 2 Plugins

  • Spring Session Grails Plugin Provides support for SpringSession project
  • Ember.js Asset-Pipeline Plugin Provides Ember.js integration with asset-pipeline. Allows for handlebars precompilation as well as scaffolding for building an emberjs application.
  • CoffeeScript Asset-Pipeline Plugin Provides coffee-script support for the asset-pipeline static asset management plugin.
  • Handlebars Asset-Pipeline Plugin Provides Handlebars precompiler support for the asset-pipeline static asset management plugin.
  • SASS/SCSS Asset-Pipeline Plugin Provides SASS/SCSS Compass support for the asset-pipeline static asset management plugin.
  • LESS Asset-Pipeline Plugin Provides LESS support for the asset-pipeline static asset management plugin.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Interesting Tweets

 

Conferences and meetups

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