Grails Diary - Week 3 in 2014

20 January 2014

Biggest Grails news of this week is the release of the new version: 2.3.5. This time 49 bugs was corrected, and an improvement: the shouldFail() method is now available in integration tests. See the release notes here. Notice there is a small change to UrlMappings from the default file in previous 2.3.x releases, that should be corrected when updating.

The first stories form the very first Grails conf in India popped up in this week. It seems to have been a big success, read an evaluation here

Oracle have released a security upgrade for the JDK. It's a critical security patch, bringing the version umber to 7u51

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

Videos of presentations

• RESTfully Async with Grails 2.3 (Graeme Rocher from SpringOne 2GX 2013)
• Grails for Hipsters! (Rob Fletcher from GR8Conf US 2013)
• Polyglot Web Development With Grails 2 (Jeff Scott Brown from SpringOne 2GX 2013)
• Using Static Analysis with Grails (Jeff Beck from GR8Conf US 2013)
• Building Grails-powered Responsive JavaScript Applications (Steve Pember from GR8Conf US 2013)

Blogs, articles, etc.

• Groovy Weekly #4 (Guillaume Laforge)
• Closures in Groovy (Alex Staveley)
• Moving from Rails to Grails (Differences and Similarities) (David Estes)
• Deploying Ratpack applications to Cloud Foundry (Russell Hart)

New Plugins

• RESTful API Plugin The resful-api plugin facilitates exposing a non-trivial,versioned RESTful API. The plugin provides a DSL that maybe used to declaratively specify how resources should bemarshalled. Please see the README.md for details.
• Zip City State Plugin Provides utilities to populate the US City and State from the provided 5 digit zip code.
• Grails Application Version Update Plugin Provides a more friendly way to update your application's version.

Updated Plugins

• Excel Export Plugin This plugin helps you export data in Excel (xlsx) format, using Apache POI.
• Grails Postgresql Extensions Plugin This plugin provides support for Postgresql Native Types like Arrays, HStores, JSON,…
• ElasticSearch GORM Plugin An alternative Elasticsearch plugin for Grails. Based on, but unlike the original, this implementation aims to be DB agnostic.
• Plastic Criteria Plugin Mock Grails Criteria for Unit Tests
• ZK plugin for Grails Originated from Flyisland's ZK Plugin, ZKGrails adds and enhances the ZK's RIA capabilities and seamlessly integrates them with Grails' infrastructures.
• Redis Plugin The Redis plugin provides integration with a Redis datastore. Redis is a lightning fast 'data structure server'. The plugin enables a number of memoization techniques to cache results from complex operations in Redis.
• 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.
• Handlebars Asset-Pipeline Plugin Provides Handlebars precompiler support for the asset-pipeline static asset management plugin.
• LESS Asset-Pipeline Plugin Provides LESS support for the asset-pipeline static asset management plugin.
• CoffeeScript Asset-Pipeline Plugin Provides coffee-script 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.
• Plugin Platform UI Platform UI - abstracted UI elements and theming for plugin/application interoperability
• Grails AWS Plugin Amazon Web Services (AWS) grails plugin provides easy access to simpler functions of AWS
• Handlebars Plugin Server side rendering of Handlebars templates
• Hibernate 4 for Grails Provides integration between Grails and Hibernate 4 through GORM
• Google Closure Compiler Plugin This plugin compiles/optimizes your javascript resources with the Google Closure
• Apache Tomcat plugin for Grails Makes Tomcat 7.0 the default servlet container for Grails at development time.
• Hibernate 3 for Grails Provides integration between Grails and Hibernate 3 through GORM
• Foundation CSS Framework for Grails Provides the Foundation CSS framework resources. Foundation is an easy to use, powerful, and flexible framework for building prototypes and production code on any kind of device. It integrates nicely with the resources plugin.
• Weceem CMS Weceem CMS is a free, open source content management system.
• Spring Security REST Plugin Implements authentication for REST APIs based on Spring Security. It uses a token-based workflow
• Retina Tag Plugin Adds retina resolution image tag support for asset-pipeline.
• REST Client Builder Plugin Grails REST Client Builder Plugin
• Easygrid Plugin Provides a declarative way of defining Data Grids. It works currently with jqGrid, google visualization and jquery dataTables. Out of the box it provides sorting, filtering, exporting and inline edit just by declaring a grid in a controller and adding a tag to your gsp. It also provides a powerful selection widget ( a direct replacement for drop-boxes )
• Wro4j Grails Plugin Web Resource Optimizer for Grails
• 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. The redis-plugin plugin also provides the possibility to set a TTL for a cached entry (using the provided @Memoize annotation), but it lacks the option to serialize any kind of Serializable objects (only object ids are cached and then hydrated from main DB).

Interesting Tweets

• @aalmiray the first of many #griffon #lazybones templates to come https://github.com/aalmiray/griffon2/tree/master/templates/griffon-standard-templates/templates/griffon-swing-groovy
• @pronoide_fer I've just sent my proposal to @greach_es, it'll be related to Sesame Street in honor to all the time I've spent watching it these last years
• @groovylang   What happened 2 the Tampa GUG? Any Groovy hackers in FLA? I'm freezing in Norway right now & am looking to code near the beach. #groovylang
• @groovyio  Sunny in Seattle today but we're working on launching a new startup on #grails #groovylang and #angular. #codeComesFirst #workOnSunTanLater
• @sebi2706 Just came back from a very producitve #groovylang hackengarten ! Check out all our commits https://github.com/rivieragug/groovy-core/commits/secureruntime
• @IanZelikman  Calling up all the #Grails framework devs: when you update something update your docs! #Grails #VMWare #Documentation
• @davydotcom  You guys wanted SASS/SCSS for #Grails Asset-pipeline ? Its on the way! http://grails.org/plugins/pending/282
• @marcinerdmann  worst thing about stackoverflow is noticing that you have new comments/reputation and you forget what you were originally looking for
• @mittie  Paraphrased: "Because of the budget cuts, we now need to be efficient and use #Grails"
• @DailyGrailsTip  P is for Parallel - http://www.gpars.org/guide/index.html
• @CedricChampeau Testing the new #groovylang CI server, sponsored by @jetbrains !
• @AnttiKole I've been a bored webdev for a long time but @GroovyLang @AngularJS #RESTful @SpringFramework @Hibernate webapp stack got me excited again.
• @mittie  Interesting to see that more and more customers pick up grails for its basic features and cost efficiency
• @CedricChampeau  Closure parameter type inference has been merged into master. #groovylang
• @epragt  My number one feature request for #Grails 3 is to be able to automatically reload the application after changing a domain class.
• @wololock  Having well-written tests makes refactoring as easy as ABC and gives a lot of fun - practice #TDD with #Spock every day :)
• @aalmiray can't stress enough how useful http://code.google.com/p/awaitility/ is. thank you @jayway!
• @tim_yates Worth remembering, any functional patterns you're playing with in #groovylang are probably covered in https://github.com/mperry/functionalgroovy by @mprry ;-)
• @aalmiray  lots of pull request being merged to groovy-core as of lately. I smell a release coming soon (crossing fingers) ^_^
• @danveloper Looking forward to using the "jcenter" repository shortcut in future versions of #Grails! https://github.com/grails/grails-core/pull/437
• @tednaleid groovy testing would be much easier if you could clone the metaClass, setting to null to regenerate isn’t good enough http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GROOVY-4355
• @alvaro_sanchez Next big thing on the Spring Security REST #Grails plugin: add support to delegate authentication to OAuth providers: http://ow.ly/swME7
• @danveloperEvery time I hear “BC”, I think “Before Cloud”… Like, when we used to just call it “ESX”. Those were the fucken days.

Conferences and meetups