Grails Diary - Week 12 in 2014

23 March 2014

The biggest (almost Grails) news of the week must be the release of Java 8. It has created a bit of buzz in the community, and I've included a couple of Java 8 related articles in this weeks Diary. As Rob Fletcher noticed, the Java and Groovy syntax are now diverging with the Java 8 release.

Cédric Champeau has created a GR8 example of how to use Groovy and Geb, to make a solver for the (warning: very addictive) 2048 game.

Gaelyk has been released in version 2.1, and is available for download. You can also try it using the Lazybones templates.

Gr8conf Europe can be followed at Conferize. The lineup and talks already announced really looks great. Tickets are available here. The GR8Conf US looks equally interesting, and have a lot of speakers and presentations ready for the July 28-29th conference. If you can't wait for GR8conf, there are still tickets available for Greach later this week! I'll be there - catch me if you have comments or suggestions for the Grails Diary, or just wish to chat :)

If you are not already following @DailyGrailsTip on Twitter, you should consider it. It is doing a nice job of supplying tips and tricks, and recently updated the avatar to the tip of a pair of Grails Sneakers. The sneakers are by the way the reason for Tge Grails Framework using the #grailsfw tag on Twitter. Best tip this week is the Groovy-based DSL for working with remote SSH servers.

Blogs, articles, etc.

• Groovy Weekly #13 (Guillaume Laforge)
• Grails Goodness: Using Hibernate Native SQL Queries (MrHaki)
• Grails Goodness: Using Groovy SQL (MrHaki)
• Setting a Tomcat version with Spring Boot and Gradle (Tomás Lin)
• Book Review: Programming Groovy 2 Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer (Mike Miller)
• Migrating from Grails 2.2 to 2.3 (Angel Ruiz)
• New Data Binding features in Grails 2.3 (Imran Mir)
• File ASCII Hex Dump using Groovy
• Java can finally join strings (Michael Scharhag)
• Exploring Micro-frameworks: Spring Boot (Dan Woods)
• Java 8 Tutorial (Benjamin Winterberg)
• Adding properties to domain classes on the fly using groovy propertyMissing feature (Jagadeesh Manne)

New Plugins

• Metrics Logger Plugin Plugin that sends application and business metrics to a configured logger.
• Open Seadragon Plugin Wraps the OpenSeadragon JavaScript library. OpenSeadragon is a pure JavaScript library that allows you to display, pan, and zoom large images. To this end, images need to be split into tiles. OpenSeadragon supports a number of formats. In order to include an all java solution here, I produce tiles for the Microsoft deep image format using modified code from https://code.google.com/p/deepjzoom/. Have a look at GitHub for a more detailed description.
• ModalBox Dynamic Form Updater Load various types of forms Self Posting,I Frame, Remote Forms and normal calls via ModalBox, upon trigger save or close depending on type of call, the underlying form is updated with new values without page refreshes.

Updated Plugins

• Atmosphere Meteor Plugin This plugin incorporates the Atmosphere Framework, which includes client and server-side components for building asynchronous web applications.
• Configurable i18n Messaging for Artefacts This plugin has the ability to add the message function just as in controllers to services or other arbitrarily defined grails artefacts. The artefacts may be configured in Confi
• Wro4j Grails Plugin Web Resource Optimizer for Grails
• External Link Choice Provider Plugin Displays external link or internal controller/action as a modalbox popup, Users can choose how they wish for these links to be opened.
• Swagger for JAX-RS Plugin Adds Swagger support to document REST APIs of projects that use the JAX-RS (JSR 311) plugin
• Hibernate 3 for Grails Provides integration between Grails and Hibernate 3 through GORM
• Hibernate 4 for Grails Provides integration between Grails and Hibernate 4 through GORM
• Grails Clojure Plugin The Clojure plugin adds support for easily accessing Clojure code in a Grails application.
• SASS/SCSS Asset-Pipeline Plugin Provides SASS/SCSS Compass support for the asset-pipeline static asset management plugin.
• Mailing List Plugin Schedule emails to a mailing group or to a person using dynamic quartz scheduling. Schedules stored within DB and upon application restart incomplete or future schedules are re-added to quartz queue.
• CDN Asset Pipeline Plugin Provides Gant scripts to automatically upload Grails app static assets to CDNs. Those scripts can easily be integrated to a build pipeline for continuous delivery/deployment. It uses Asset Pipeline Grails Plugin to precompile assets and Karman Grails Plugin to upload files to various Cloud Storage Services.
• MongoDB GORM A plugin that integrates the Mongo document datastore into Grails, providing a GORM API onto it
• 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
• Dynamic Db Config Property Plugin This plugin provides your application the ability to change the config properties without restarting the application. The values in Config.groovy are persisted in database and a set of interfaces manages frequently-used properties.
• Hibernate Application Info Hibernate Application Info
• Application Info UI for inspecting various aspects of the application's configuration
• Dynamic Controller Plugin Supports controller mixins, where action closures are retrieved from various sources including existing controllers, files, database source, etc. Can also create full controllers dynamically.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• AngularJS Resources Plugin Angular JS resources plugin
• Grails Apache Nutch alternative Very simple alternative to Apache Nutch created i
• 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.

Interesting Tweets

• @DailyGrailsTip #grailsfw Plugin lets you use #groovylang expressions in Javascript and CSS asset files for Asset Pipeline - http://grails.org/plugin/groovy-template-grails-asset-pipeline
• @musketyr don’t forget you can simply try it using lazybones thanks to awesome @kdabir or fetch it from maven central.
• @grailsframework Accessing data with @grailsframework’s GORM for @MongoDB in Spring Boot /cc @springcentral https://spring.io/guides/gs/accessing-data-gorm-mongodb/ #groovylang #grailsfw
• @CedricChampeau Attending my AST xform workshop @greach_es, you may want to prepare yself by doing what the prerequisites say here: http://bit.ly/1jmEtOq
• @CedricChampeau The real challenge with AST transformations is when you happen to use generics. This increases complexity by an order of magnitude.
• @sebi2706 You can check here what we have been building during the AeroGear Hackergarten : https://github.com/sebastienblanc/hackergarten-messenger // cc @yrezgui @LowDoll
• @danveloper LOL and Ha Ha at @DailyGrailsTip's new avatar! #excellent #grails
• @dakoba Migrated an older App from Resources PlugIn to Asset Pipeline PlugIn. Easy as 1-2-3. #grailsfw #grails
• @grailsframework MongoDB plugin v2.0 out http://grails.org/news/1289916 with support for Spring Boot /cc @springcentral @mongodb @gopivotal #grailsfw #groovylang
• @russel_winder There is no doubt about it, #Groovy power asserts are absolutely f@@@@@@ brilliant. That is all.
• @GR8ConfUS Tickets for GR8Conf US are on sale today! Register in the next two weeks to get the Door Buster discount! http://gr8conf.us
• @mittie #groovylang can do much more static checks than Java and can be much more dynamic at the same time!
• @jeffscottbrown Stuff you can do with AST transforms and type checking extensions makes Groovy such a powerful programming tool. #groovylang
• @sam_farmer gr8conf, the US version, looks fantastic this year http://gr8conf.us/ #grails #grailsfw #groovylang
• @DailyGrailsTip #grailsfw arrested plugin generates AngularJS views backed by RESTful Controllers from domain classes http://grails.org/plugin/arrested
• @rfletcherEW Interesting that #jdk8 means that Java and #groovylang syntax are diverging.
• @boardbloke_uk @rfletcherEW @glaforge I prefer groovy closure syntax to lambda. Arguments in the curly braces looks much nicer...
• @burtbeckwith The latest #grailsfw app-info and app-info-hibernate plugins work with #Grails 2.3 (and all versions 2.0+)
• @mstine How about a nice new app scaling demo app for @cloudfoundry using Spring Boot and Groovy? https://github.com/cf-platform-eng/cf-scale-boot
• @ldaley Anyone know of any decent documentation on static groovy? Googling is not pull up much.
• @rus_hart @DailyGrailsTip also check out the example-books project to see ratpack and rxjava in action https://github.com/ratpack/example-books
• @robpatrick Spring Framework release 4.0 includes a port of the Grails Bean Builder to the core Spring - nice. http://spring.io/blog/2014/03/03/groovy-bean-configuration-in-spring-framework-4 #grails #spring
• @DailyGrailsTip Rapid Web Application Development with Spark, #groovylang and JRebel - http://spinscale.github.io/2013-02-rapid-web-application-development-with-spark-groovy-jrebel.html
• @danveloper #jdk8 is upon us. The future is now.
• @aalmiray just ran my first JDK8 lambda powered #griffon 2.0.0 application and you know what? It. Works. Flawlessly ^_
• @kyleboon Everyone doing development on the JVM should probably watch http://yow.eventer.com/yow-2013-1080/beyond-jvm-by-charles-nutter-1374 by @headius
• @DailyGrailsTip Stefan Armbruster shares his experiences integrating Ratpack & Neo4j http://blog.armbruster-it.de/2013/09/some-experiments-with-ratpack-and-neo4j/
• @tednaleid apparently the grails intellij reloading stuff is an intellij issue: http://jira.grails.org/browse/GRAILS-11196 and is fixed in 136.1146 http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-121928

Conferences and meetups