Grails Diary - weeks 11-17 in 2017

08 May 2017

This time a many weeks (/back from the dead) edition of the Grails diary, sorry for that, but I've been both on vacation in Spain around the Greach Conference, and annoyingly busy, including switching job. Due to the long time, I guarantee that there is plenty of material (and plenty that I have missed too).

The Greach Confonference was a blast like always. The videos section is packed with lots of great presentations, and I have to take a close look at some of the ones I missed. The first day was all workshops, and while I was doing some last minute additions to my own talk on Jenkins Pipeline, I did sit in on "Excel in Groovy" by Vladimir Orany and "Gradle Plugin writing Workshop" by Schalk Cronjé. Both were well executed, and with plenty of content to work on also after the conference. I have already recommended the material from Schalk's workshop to a few others on my current team. The best workshop i attended was "Your Very First Macro Method" by Groovy Core Committer Sergei Egorov. First Sergei improvised a AST writing session, as not many had done any, before showing how elegant and simple the same problem could be done with Macro Groovy. The example used in the worshop was a handy super-logger, that I have missed many times. His slides are available here. From the two conference days, I can recommend "Geb Best Practices" by Marcin Erdmann, covering multiple more or less advanced tips for using Geb, "Mastering Async in Ratpack" by Danny Hyun, and "Groovy Integration Testing with Spock and Docker" by Kevin Wittek. All in all an awesome job by Iván López and Alberto Vilches for putting this great event togeather. Finally, jmiguel rodriguez has shared his photos from the conference.

Since the last edition, Groovy has had two releases, 2.4.10 and 2.4.11. Both are bugfix releases and updates to documentation. I find it more interesting that the first alpha release of Groovy 2.5 is available bringing macro groovy support, many small new features and a large number of bugfixes. Also, the new parser (parrot), has been merged to master, and will likely come in the 2.6 release. Congrats to John Wagenleitner, who has joined the Groovy PMC.

Business Insider has Groovy as one of 16 programming languages on the list Learn any of these 16 programming languages and you'll always have a job

The Grails team has release a couple of patch versions of Grails too, 3.2.8 and 3.2.9, to go along with the 2.5.6 and 3.1.16 maintenence releases. The more interesting release is the official release of GORM 6.1(0,1 and 2). In Grails it is now easy to set the Gorm version, by adding "gormVersion=6.1.2" to gradle.properties. You should definitely check out Grame Rochers Grails Keynote from Greach to get all the news, including a demo of the new auto generated service methods. He also shared the demo of GORM 6.1.

Every week a new guide is added to guides.grails.org, within a large range of topics. A couple I found interesting are Building a Graph application with Grails and Neo4j, and Create a custom authentication mechanism with Spring Security Core Plugin . Alberto De Ávila has shared slides and code for his workshop at Greach on Testing in Grails.

Grails has now integrated with Google App Engine (GAE), and you can run your Grails applications on GAE over the Google Cloud Platform. A guide is also available.

The Ratpack team has made a bugfix release 1.4.6, fixing a validation against https servers error in the http client. The team is also working hard on getting version 1.5 ready, and the first two release candidates are available for testing. It comes with support for Promise based JDBC transactions, a ratpack-consul modules for Consul backed config managememt, lots new methods on the Promise class and some convenience updates. Checkout the upcomming release notes. I can also reecommend a great article on Practical Ratpack Promises by Jon Bevan.

Mario Garcia has released a first version of GQL, a Groovy library for GraphQL. The website is at grooviter.github.io/gql, with links to documentation and code. From the documentation: "GQL is a set of Groovy DSLs and AST transformations built on top of GraphQL-java to make it easier building GraphQL schemas and execute GraphQL queries without losing type safety" In the video section, you can also find Marios presentation GraphQL development with Groovy from Greach on GQL

The Codenarc project has received a bit of love from Jenn Strater, and a few new rules has been added. The latest version is now 0.27.0.

The Geb website, gebish.org/ has gotten a major facelift, thanks to Antony Jones.

The Gradle team has added a guide section to the documentation at gradle.org/docs#guides, including guides on Designing Gradle Plugins and Implementing Gradle Plugins.

Gradle 3.5 has also been released, with a new Build Cache, that saves time by reusing outputs from previous executions, and a new output format, and a new plugin management block to better control where plugins are resolved from.

The Gradle Site Plugin is a new useful, real-world example that uses best practices from the Gradle plugin dev guides, and a good way to get examples on plugin work in Gradle from.

The http-builder-ng project has been updated with enhanced exception handling, Generic Multipart request encoder, a reworked user guide, and performance improvements with cookies. The 1.0 release is getting nearer, and you can supply feedback on what is missing before then

The mock server for testing fx. rest clients, the Ersatz Server, is out in version 1.2.0, with deeper cookie matching support. It is quite easy to use, and worth a look if you hav not already.

GR8Conf EU is just a few weeks away, and you should secure your ticket soon! I'm looking forward to this years edition, which includes a day with focus on DevOps technologies in and outside the Groovy Ecosystem. Hope to see you there!

 

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