Grails Diary - Week 2 in 2014

13 January 2014

The next release for Grails that Graeme at GGX expected to be ready before 2014 is still not ready. What has been released during this week is a new plugin by Álvaro Sánchez: Spring Security REST Plugin, providing the use of Spring Security for a stateless, token-based, RESTful authentication. This seems to solve several problems on stackoverflow :)

This week, New Relic announced that they now provides Grails support. This looks very interesting, and I'm looking forward to giving it a test run.

If you are new to Grails (or Grails 2), there could be help provided in the new book Grails 2: A Quick-Start Guide by Dave Klein and Ben Klein from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Peter Niederwieser has written a set of excellent guidelines for contributing to spock. It is well worth a read, and much of it is valid for most open source projects.

Remember you can sign up to Guillaume Laforge's excellent Groovy Weekly newsletter here. If you wish to have the Grails Diary as RSS feed, it is available here

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

Finally, a personal thanks to Luke Daley for help on configuring Geb.

Videos of presentations

• Grails and the Real-time Web (Stephane Maldini from SpringOne 2GX 2013)

Blogs, articles, etc.

• Groovy Weekly #3 (Guillaume Laforge)
• Closure parameter type inference for Groovy (Cédric Champeau)
• 15 Reasons Why You Should Use The Grails Web Application Framework (Amit Jain)
• Groovy Weather: A New Groovy Example at Java.net (Ken Kousen)
• Identifying Gradle Conventions (Dustin Marx)
• Spock @ConfineMetaClassChanges annotation made writing grails unit test easier (Amit Jain)
• Grails integration with Vaadin (Ondrej Kvasnovsky)

New Plugins

• Turbolinks Plugin that makes following links in your web application faster by leveraging Turbolinks
• Spring Security REST Plugin Implements authentication for REST APIs based on Spring Security. It uses a token-based workflow

Updated Plugins

• 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.
• JavaMelody Grails Plugin Integrate JavaMelody Monitoring into grails application.
• Console Plugin A web-based Groovy console for interactive runtime application management and debugging
• LESS Asset-Pipeline Plugin Provides LESS support for the asset-pipeline static asset management plugin.
• AWS SDK Plugin The AWS SDK Plugin allows your Grails application to use the Amazon Web Services infrastructure services. It provides simple wrapper service around the official AWS SDK for Java. Using the SDK, developers can build solutions for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon SimpleDB, and more.
• SeedMe Plugin Implements a standard convention for adding seed data to your application.
• Jersey Request Builder Plugin Provides the Jersey client library and a builder to simplify use of the library.
• Grooscript Vertx Plugin Use your groovy code in your gsps thanks to GrooScript. It converts the code to javascript and your groovy code will run in your browser. Also use Vert.x to use events between server and gsps.
• 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.
• Grails Spring Batch Plugin Adds the Spring Batch framework to application. Allows for job configuration using Spring Bean DSL. See documentation at https://github.com/johnrengelman/grails-spring-batch for details.
• Weceem CMS A CMS that you can install into your own applications, as used by the Weceem CMS application
• Tomcat JDBC Pool plugin Replaces default Grails Commons DBCP Pool with Tomcat JDBC Pool (https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/jdbc-pool.html)
• Apache Tomcat 8 plugin Makes Tomcat 8.x the servlet container for Grails at development time
• Rabbitmq Native Plugin The native RabbitMQ Grails plugin provides easily consumable messaging functionality.
• Optimus Plugin Grails Optimus Plugin
• Grails SendGrid Plugin Allows the sending of Email via SendGrid's services
• 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. 
• jawr Grails plugin jawr grails plugin
• Sentry Client Plugin Sentry Client for Grails
• CORS Plugin Installs a servlet filter to set Access-Control-Allow-Origin and other CORS related headers to enable cross site AJAX requests to your Grails application

Interesting Tweets

• @RyanVanderwerfw00t! got my talk abstracts in order to submit to #gr8conf and #s2gx. I hope people will enjoy them and find them useful!
• @davydotcom Just finished reading @burtbeckwith Grails book.. Very helpful and informative! A must read for #Grails developers
• Reading about Grails after not following it for almost two years really show you how it advanced #Grails #Java #WebFrameworks
• @IanZelikman
• @sbglasius whoa. Dit my first pull-request for #grails http://bit.ly/1agsb0v Giving back to the community. What at great feeling :-)
• @davidthecoder Congratulations to @lhotari on his first week @gopivotal working on @grailsframework . Awesome dude.
• @tomaslin If you want to dream up new startups with someone that likes Grails, talk to .@Bredo and Hyper Labs - https://medium.com/p/a5e1d5515944
• @pledbrook I have updated the installation instructions for the Searchable plugin so it works with #grails 2.3: http://grails.org/plugin/searchable
• @crazysmoove Think going from #groovylang to Java is bad? Try Groovy all day followed by VB.Net at night. LanguageMaturity -= 30.years
• @CedricChampeau Submitted a talk about #groovylang to develop #android apps for @gr8conf.
• @RyanVanderwerf I think someone needs to represent #grails at this: http://www.meetup.com/virtualJUG/events/153096902/
• @vaclav_pech  Lazy tasks that only run if the result is consumed are being added to #gpars 1.2 https://github.com/GPars/GPars/blob/master/src/test/groovy/groovyx/gpars/samples/dataflow/DemoLazyTaskDependencies.groovy
• @burtbeckwith This is why it's irresponsible and expensive to use save(failOnError:true) in #grails http://shipilev.net/blog/2014/exceptional-performance/
• @michaelmorett Grails 2.3.4 date binding is so sweet. I would go as far as saying grails.databinding.dateFormats is almost erotic.
• @rfletcherEW  The #Grails async support in 2.3 is really nice until something goes wrong and you want to know what it was
• @jbaruch Did I mention not only @ratpackweb framework is amazing, they have one of the most stylish sites I ever saw? Love it! http://ow.ly/skQWD
• @rfletcherEW Been using the #Grails asset pipeline plugin for the first time & it’s seamless. Really impressed.
• @gernotstarke I released v 1.0 of pdfstamper, a small (#griffon/#groovy-based) utility to add page/chapter/header to pdf files: https://bitbucket.org/arc42/pdfstamper/overview

Conferences and meetups