Grails Diary - Week 25 in 2014

24 June 2014

This week, the Grails team released new versions on both the 2.3 and 2.4 line. The release notes for 2.3.10 is found here, and the release notes for 2.4.1 is found here. The 2.4.1 version uses Groovy 2.3.3, where the problems with anonymous inner classes are solved. It also includes the HibernateTestMixin annotation, which makes it possible to use all GORM features also in Grails unit tests, using Hibernate 4 and a H2 in-memory database. This even includes testing string-based HQL queries.

If you wish to contribute to Groovy, then Cédric has provided a video on how to set up IntelliJ , and Peter has written a nice blog on how to contribute to the Groovy documentation.

Gradle has a new release candidate, Gradle 2.0/rc/2, please help testing this rc.

Podcasts and Videos of Presentations

• Devoxx 2013: What makes Groovy groovy? (Guillaume Laforge)
• Groovy Podcast Ep. 3 (Peter Ledbrook)
• Contributing for the Groovy language: setting up IntelliJ IDEA (Cédric Champeau)

Blogs, Articles, etc.

• Groovy Weekly #26 (Guillaume Laforge)
• Contributing to the Groovy documentation (Peter Ledbrook)
• Spocklight: Ignore Specifications Based On Conditions (MrHaki)
• Groovy related talks at JavaOne 2014 (Guillaume Laforge)
• Gradle Summit 2014 Recap (John Engelman)
• MongoDB and Grails (Alex Staveley)
• Testing with Spock
• Static analysis and strictness (Rob Fletcher)
• OAuth 2.0 using Grails Part - 2 (Pulkit Pushkarna)

New Plugins

• Quick Books Online Plugin Grails plugin for integration with the QuickBooks Online API.

Updated Plugins

• Spring Security REST Plugin Implements authentication for REST APIs based on Spring Security. It uses a token-based workflow
• Grails Scaffolding Plugin Handles the configuration of dynamic scaffolding
• CXF plug-in for Grails Brings easy exposure of service and endpoint classes as Apache CXF SOAP Services to Grails.
• 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.
• Wro4j Grails Plugin Web Resource Optimizer for Grails
• Test Code Coverage Plugin Creates Code Coverage reports for your code
• 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
• Time Series Redis Plugin Redis implementation of time series.
• Time Series Elastic Search Plugin Elastic Search implementation of time series.
• Time Series Plugin Provides a simplified service for reading/writing timeseries and counter data and storing it in a variety of time resolutions. Read method output is intended to support javascript charting libraries. The plugin defines an interface for pluggable storage providers and includes an implementation in-memory storage provider
• Slug Generator This plugin generates unique slugs for String properties. Its main use case is to generate unique and "nice" URLs for accessing domain
• 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
• Remote Pagination Plugin Remote-Pagination plugin provides tags for pagination and to sort columns without page refresh, using ajax and loads only the list of objects needed. It supports multiple paginations as well. More than one remotePaginate, remotePageScroll, remoteNonStopPageScroll and remoteSortableColumn can be used on the same page unlike non-ajax pagination tags.
• Neo4j GORM A plugin that integrates the Neo4j graph database into Grails, providing a GORM API onto it
• RESTful API Plugin The resful-api plugin facilitates exposing a non-trivial, versioned RESTful API. The plugin provides a DSL that may be used to declaratively specify how resources should be marshalled. Please see the README.md for details.
• Spud Cms Plugin Provides CMS functionality for Spud
• Quartz plugin for Grails Adds Quartz job scheduling features
• 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
• Distributed Lock Plugin This plugin provides a framework and interface for a synchronization mechanism distributed to multiple server instances. In today's world of horizontal computational scale and massive concurrency, it becomes increasingly difficult to synchronize operations outside the context of a single computational space (server/process). This plugin aims to make that easier by providing a simple service to facilitate this, as well as defining an interface for adding low level providers.
• ElasticSearch Grails Plugin The revived Elasticsearch plugin for Grails.
• Security Bridge Plugin Defines a standard corss-plugin security bridge implementation for better decoupling of authentication in plugin heavy applications.
• Spud Markdown Plugin Adds Markdown formatting support to the Spud Site Management platform.
• 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.
• 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.

Interesting Tweets

• @aalmiray watch out for http://www.gradle.org/docs/release-candidate/release-notes#+=-operator-changes-that-typically-affect-configuration-of-eclipse-and-idea-plugin when upgrading to #gradle 2.x; mental noted, read all release notes before upgrading
• @rfletcherEW Who was I talking to at #gr8conf about forcing specific versions of dependencies in Gradle?
• @ErinWith2Ls Need suggestions for newbie exercises to do with a simple list/show/create #Grails app. Already have "add a field to domain and propagate"
• @ysb33r If there is one thing that #gradle is miles ahead of most (if not all) other buildsystems, it is the bootstrap capability of 'gradlew'
• @rfletcherEW Just been looking at @ratpackweb again. The test support capabilities in there are just fantastic. Kind of thing most “frameworks” overlook

Conferences and meetups