Grails Diary - Week 24 in 2014

17 June 2014

This week has offered a new Groovy release and the Gradle Summit, creating cuite a lot of Gradle releated buzz. The Groovy team released version 2.3.3 and 2.4-beta-1 with Android support . If you have had issues with annonymous inner classes, upgrading to 2.3.3 is worth a shot. Spring Boot now comes in version 1.1.1, and it and Groovy is available for download with GVM Tool.

The documentation for Groovy has a new look in the beta version. Peter Ledbrook suggest to set aside half an hour to an hour a day to contribute to the Groovy user guide; Rob Fletcherconsiders doing the same for the Spock documentation, and Russel Winder notes that the Gpars documentation soon switches to ASCIIDoc (great opportunity to learn that if you haven't).

Rob Fletcher currently has 5 and a half chapter ready on his (long awaited) book on Spock testing. I'm really looking forward to it! (and wondering if the framework will get a logo n the process)

Jorge Franco has created a road map for his fascinating work on Grooscript, compiling Groovy code into javascript.

Along with the Gradle summit, a new Gradle plugin portal was set live. In the tweets section, there is some of the news from the Summit, but I expect more to come in the next days.

If you could use a brush-up on security issues, check out the Grails.nV: The vulnerable Grails application, currently having 17 security issues from CRSF to SQL injection build in, and with tutorials included.

The videos from GR8Conf EU is almost ready to be released (one by one), but until then, take a look at Andres Almirays photos from the Hackergarden night

Blogs, Articles, etc.

New Plugins

  • Selection Plugin The selection plugin provides unified selection of information. It uses a URI based syntax to select any information from any resource. Grails plugins can add custom search providers. Example 1: gorm://person/list?name=Gr%25 Example 2: ldap:dc=my-company&dc=com&cn=users Example 3: bean://myService/method Example 4: https://dialer.mycompany.com/outbound/next?agent=liza
  • Recent Domain List This plugin remembers what domain instances has been viewed by a user and provides tags for rendering "recent viewed" or "crumb trail" lists.
  • Distributed Lock Plugin Provides a conveniance service for synchronizing an operation outside the scope of a single container
  • Time Series Redis Plugin Redis implementation of time series.
  • Grails Admin Interface Grails Admin allows you to easily create an administration back-office with default styles and operations. You cand extend and configure this administrator to improve the experience of your users. The default admin also provides an API to ease the integration with already existing administration back-offices and integration with Spring Security (version 1 and 2) to use the security behaviour of your application. This is a similar project to those existing in others MVC frameworks such as Django ...
  • Individual User Tags Let individual users add tags to domain instances.

Updated Plugins

  • Disqus Plugin Embed Disqus system into your application. To simplify the usage of Disqus you can use this plugin. Simple add disqus tag into the pages where you want to allow users to comment stuff.
  • Timestamped Plugin Provides an annotation to create the autotimestamping properties using a configurable, joda-time compatible AST transform.
  • Coveralls.io Grails Plugin The Coveralls Plugin allows you to send Grails code coverage report to Coveralls. Coveralls works with your continuous integration server to give you test coverage history and statistics.
  • Grails Postgresql Extensions Plugin This plugin provides hibernate user types to support for Postgresql Native Types like Arrays, HStores, JSON,… as well as new criterias to query this native types
  • Page Resources Plugin Enhances the resources plugin by allowing for creation of "page" resource modules using convention over configuration.
  • Mongeez Plugin A plugin that integrates the Mongeez change management system for MongoDB into Grails.
  • 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.
  • CRaSH Grails Plugin Integrates the Common Reusable SHell (CRaSH - http://crashub.org/ ) into Grails.
  • 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
  • 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. 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.
  • Geb integration for Grails Integrates the geb functional testing framework
  • Cxf Client - Support for Soap Service Endpoints Used for easily calling soap web services. Provides wsdl2java grails target to easily generate code into src/java from configured cxf clients. Ability to dynamically update endpoint at runtime.
  • Redis Cache Plugin A Redis-based implementation of the Cache plugin
  • Apache Tomcat plugin for Grails Makes Tomcat 7.0 the default servlet container for Grails at development time.
  • Redis GORM A plugin that integrates the Redis key/value datastore into Grails, providing a GORM-like API onto it
  • 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
  • QR Code plugin This plugin allows you to create QR codes as part of your Grails application without the need for an external service.
  • Spring Security REST Plugin Implements authentication for REST APIs based on Spring Security. It uses a token-based workflow
  • Spud Cms Plugin Provides CMS functionality for Spud
  • Spud Core Plugin Spud Admin is a dependency package that adds a nice looking administrative panel to any project you add it to. It supports easy grails app integration and provides core functionality for spud modules.
  • Searchable Plugin Adds rich search functionality to Grails domain models. Built on Compass (http://www.compass-project.org/) and Lucene (http://lucene.apache.org/) This version is recommended for JDK 1.5+
  • Provides Mail support to a running Grails application This plug-in provides a MailService class as well as configuring the necessary beans within the Spring Applicatio
  • Grails JCaptcha Plugin Makes using JCaptcha within a Grails app simple
  • D3 resources Provides resource files for the D3.js JavaScript library.

Interesting Tweets

 

Conferences and meetups

GR8conf US, Minneapolis - USA, July 28th-29th, 2014.
SpringOne 2GX 2014, Dallas - USA, September 8th - 11th, 2014.
Groovy Grails Exchange, London - GB, December 12th - 13th, 2014
G48, global, TBD
GR8conf Europe, Copenhagen - Denmark, June 2nd -4th, 2015.