Grails Diary - Week 15 in 2014

14 April 2014

In a week, where the news has been dominated by security issues with the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL, there is still lots of news from the GR8 community.

The groovy team has released the second beta for version 2.3. There is a minor breaking change in whitespace handling in Groovys XML support, read all about it in Guillaume Laforges blog post.

The Gradle team just announced that 1.12 will have a release candidate ready soon, and that it will be the last release in the 1.x line, Luke Daley describes the comming changes in this blog post

If you are using the Weceem plugin, it has been updated, and besides bugfixes, is now compatible with Grails 2.3.x.

Videos of presentations

• BDD using Cucumber JVM and Groovy (Marco Vermeulen from Greach 2014)
• Making Java APIs Groovy (Cédric Champeau from Greach 2014)
• Architectural Flexibility using Groovy (David Dawson from Greach 2014)
• Metaprogramming with Groovy (Iván López Martín from Greach 2014)
• The functional side of Groovy (Mario Garcia from Greach 2014)
• Building Micro Services using Spring Boot and friends (Marco Vermeulen from Greach 2014)
• Groovy VFS (Schalk Cronjé from Greach 2014)
• Groovy,GPars,CompileStatic, invokedynamic and Java 8 (Russel Winder from Greach 2014)

Blogs, articles, etc.

• Groovy Weekly #16 (Guillaume Laforge)
• The Grails depedency injection inheritance pitfall (Michael Scharhag)
• Spock Mock Cheatsheet (Craig Atkinson)
• Iterate through two distinct dates – Groovy 2.2 (Abhishek Tejpaul)
• Customizing URL Formats in Grails (Making your URLs case insensitive) (Manvendra Singh)
• Artifactory and Grails
• Customizing Fusion Chart For Various Type Via Grails (Komal Jain)

New Plugins

• RestApiDoc Plugin The RestApiDoc plugin allows to document your Grails Rest API. Thanks to some Annotations (@), you will be ready to build a full API report (with a playground to perform test request). The plugin is based on

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.
• Api Toolkit The Grails API Toolkit is a complete set of API tools and an API abstraction layer that automates alot of the tasks needed to build your API like api docs, real time notifications / webhooks, generated headers, responsive content type and more.TYPE This also abstracts the API away from the Controller/model with a more universal API Object that can be defined with roles, rules and definitions for handling the request and response at the front controller.
• Excel Export Plugin This plugin helps you export data in Excel (xlsx) format, using Apache POI.
• Wro4j Grails Plugin Web Resource Optimizer for Grails
• Grails AWS Plugin Amazon Web Services (AWS) grails plugin provides easy access to simpler functions of AWS
• Bridges Weceem authentication to Spring Security Provides the glue needed to make Weceem plugin use Spring Security for authorisation and authentication. Your application still needs to configure Spring-Security however. The domain class is expected to include "email" property.
• Weceem CMS Weceem CMS is a free, open source content management system.
• Jersey Request Builder Plugin Provides the Jersey client library and a builder to simplify use of the library.
• Easy Custom XML and JSON Marshalling for Grails Converters Easy registration and usage of custom XML and JSON marshallers supporting hierarchical configurations.Further documentation can be found on the GitHub repo.
• Arrested Plugin Generates RESTful controllers for domain classes and maps them in UrlMappings, generates single-page AngularJS-based views, and provides simple token-based security
• Grails Flyway 2 Plugin Adds support for Flyway 2
• Testapps Plugin Provides a script and a DSL to create Grails applications to test your plugins.
• Grails Reporting Js Plugin Grails Report Tool
• JQuery EasyUI from Grails Supplies jQuery EasyUI resources and taglibs. Depends on jQuery EasyUI plugin. See http://www.jeasyui.com/
• Grails My Malcom Api Plugin This plugin provides a service to send push notifications to your mobile devices via MyMalcom (http://www.mymalcom.com) from your grails application.
• Raphaël for Grails Plugin that provides the JavaScript Vector Library Raphaël. Cross-browser vector graphics the easy way. It integrates nicely with the resources plugin.

Interesting Tweets

• @CedricChampeau Sometimes as experts of a domain, we forget how hard it was to grab the concepts.
• @pledbrook I was just thinking the other day that the #groovylang GDK needs updating for Java NIO and NIO2: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GROOVY-6377 - great news
• @villesv I often feel that Windows workstations (used by developers) are to automation and tooling what IE6 is to websites.
• @glaforge MadEye, pair programming / code review / collaboration over Google Hangout https://madeye.io/
• @mrhaki Add color to data sources in #IntellijIDEA for visual feedback when working with data source objects http://mrhaki.blogspot.com/2014/04/coloring-different-data-sources-in.html #IDEA #intellij
• @CedricChampeau If you missed it, docs for new template engine in Groovy 2.3: http://bit.ly/1dvSULe + http://bit.ly/NVs8CU and http://bit.ly/1fv9RCB
• @alvaro_sanchez Don't know how to explain how I feel when I see people amazed Java8 lambdas. A first-class JVM language had that 8 years ago: #groovylang
• @ysb33r More and more there are days that I wish for a #groovylang based alternative to Chef and Puppet
• @danveloper This is #prospock from @ldaley - https://github.com/ratpack/ratpack/blob/master/ratpack-jackson/src/test/groovy/ratpack/jackson/JacksonParsingSpec.groovy#L53-75 #amazing #spockfw #computers #internet
• @OlivierCroisier Java 8 known issues : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/8-known-issues-2157115.html#A999961
• @burtbeckwith Fascinating talk from 2 months ago slamming OpenSSL and bad security practices in general http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/22mrxo/on_feb_2_phk_correctly_identified_openssl_as_a/
• @CedricChampeau That's really cool to see feedback for traits. First time I really see many feedback on a beta release. That's positive! #groovylang
• @DailyGrailsTip Gretty is a gradle plugin that helps you run your web-apps on jetty - https://github.com/akhikhl/gretty
• @gopivotal ICYMI: #Spring Tool Suite and #Groovy/#Grails Tool Suite 3.5.0 released | http://ow.ly/vvHWz

Conferences and meetups