Vacations won’t stop me from updating you about all the latest developments in the Groovy community! In this short introduction, I’d like to bring your attention to the fact that the Groovy ecosystem got accepted as an organization for the Google Summer of Code program. So if you are a student, or know students, or engineering schools, universities, etc, interested in contributing to projects of the Groovy ecosystem, please don’t hesitate to spread the word!

An interesting column this week thanks to the major release of Griffon 1.5, but also a minor release of Grails 2.3.6 which brings the often requested standalone GORM support!

Releases

• Grails 2.3.6 released, including GORM standalone support
• Griffon 1.5 is released

Articles

• Cédric Champeau details in a two parts article his work on a new template engine for Groovy, that is fast, can be type checked and statically compiled
• Second part of the article from Cédric Champeau about his new markup template engine for Groovy with advanced explanations about static type checking extensions and static compilation
• More on the Groovy client for the Light-Table IDE
• André Steingreß covers Java-based configuration with Grails
• Marco Vermeulen explains how to deploy apps like Ratpack, Spring Boot or Dropwizard on Heroku thanks to Gradle
• VoltDB integrates Groovy for its datastore inline procedure language
• An article on RelProxy, a project for a hot class reloader and scripting for Java and Groovy
• Enum to Switch on Class types in Java and Groovy

Presentations

• Ken Kousen presents advanced Groovy features, such as closure coercion, mixins, simple runtime metaprogramming, operator overloading, drop and take, overlooked methods in the Groovy JDK, and more (recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013)
• Greg Turnquist demoes using Spring Mail, Security, REST, GridFS, Bootstrap and jQuery in a production grade Grails application
• John Engelman presents a talk on enterprise Grails with Spring Batch for batch processing

Mailing-list discussions

• Rick Hightower’s been working on the new JSON parser for Groovy 2.3 to give Groovy the fastest JSON parser available on the JVM, and along with Andrey Blochestov they are also looking at making the creation of JSON payloads also super fast

Code snippets

• Andrés Almiray on the simplicity of functional testing for Griffon applications
• Miguel de la Cruz shows his experiment with a minimal web server implemented with Ratpack

Tweets

• Griffon 1.5 available through GVM
• GVM now offers Gradle 1.11 too
• Johannes Link, contributor of the @TailRecursive transformation for Groovy 2.3, compared the performance of @TailRecursive on methods vs trampoline() on closures, and indicate that the performance advantage is for @TailRecursive
• Dave Syer shows an example of a Spring Boot controller written in Groovy that outputs JSON
• Bobby Warner notes that the Asset pipeline plugin replaces the resources plugin by default from Grails 2.4 onward

Other news

• The @TailRecursive transformation has been contributed by Johannes Link and Cédric Champeau merged the pull request into the Groovy 2.3 branch
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Week #7 of the Grails diary

Books

• The final version of the Gradle in Action eBook is available

Events

• Registration for GR8Conf Europe 2014 is open
• You can find the Greach conference on Lanyard
• A new Groovy user group in Warsaw, Poland
• Peter Ledbrook is speaking about why your build matters, and the importance of Gradle

In Stockholm for the JFokus conference, I was happy to meet some of the members of the Groovy community, and had the chance to speak about the Groovy usage patterns and how companies integrate Groovy. But while I’m having fun in Sweden (with heaps of fever though), we are laying out the new infrastructure for the Groovy project with the help of JetBrains and JFrog, or work is underway to make Groovy’s JSON support the fastest around (more infor to come soon)! So it’s been a busy week!

Releases

• Ratpack 0.9.1 is released, with performance and memory consumption improvements, as well as an RxJava module
• John Engelman releases version 2.0.0 of the Grails-Gradle plugin
• Cédric Champeau created a Gradle plugin for JBake, to be able to render static web sites as part of your Gradle build
• Release of an update to the Grails Api Toolkit plugin helping build API with REST, RPC and HATEOAS support

Articles

• The Groovy style guide shared by Guillaume Laforge echoing a conversation on Twitter about the bad practice of putting def everywhere
• Cédric Champeau details how to create your own static blog with JBake, Gradle and Github
• An article on Groovy Memoization by Brendon Anderson
• Why is Groovy groovy?
• Burt Beckwith offers one more approach for diagnosing spring-security-core login errors
• André Steingreß covers the Grails Audit plugin
• André Steingreß is covering Grails testing with Cucumber
• Following up on his previous post, André Steingreß continues his Grails testing with Cucumber
• Jochen Theodorou explains what class duplication is and how it happens
• Testing Grails with Cucumber, HTTPBuilder, and RemoteControl
• Ken Kousen plays with Groovy’s date support
• Hubert Klein Ikkink shares some tips about cleaning up your Grails projects
• Following up on MrHaki’s Grails clean-up tip, André Steingreß offers his own Grails tip for cleaning up everything in a single rm command
• Michael Scharhag blogs about using database views in Grails
• A tutorial on developing a Grails application with Facebook Connect
• A broad stroke overview of Grails web app development framework

Presentations

• Hubert Klein Ikkink, alias MrHaki, presented Getting Groovy, at GR8Conf Europe 2013.
• Ken Kousen advises Java developers how to do similar tasks in Groovy: building and testing applications, accessing both relational and NoSQL databases, accessing web services, and more.
• At GR8Conf US 2013, Craig Atkinson presents the advantages of using the Geb functional testing library for creating robust and readable tests with both JUnit and Spock, and configuring Geb for testing across multiple browsers.
• Recorded at GR8Conf US 2013, Kyle Boon reviews 3 frameworks for building RESTful WS (Grails, Dropwizard and Ratpack), comparing their code readability, maintainability, deployment, metrics collection, scalability and testability.
• At SpringOne2GX 2013, Joe Rinehart discusses some of the essential security topics for Grails (and Java) Web applications, showing how Grails can make life easier and the pitfalls of attempting to secure highly dynamic code.
• Ryan Vanderwerf explains setting up Terracotta and clustering a Grails application using Ehcache, HTTP Session in Tomcat, and Quartz. Recorded at GR8Conf US 2013.

Mailing-list discussions

• Dinko Srkoč announces the birth of his stream extension to Groovy’s Sql facility (potentially to be included in Groovy)

Code snippets

• Tim Yates is trying to implement Groovy’s collate() method with Java 8 streams and lambdas.
• Tim Yates offers a little sample showing how to display a little spinner icon in text mode for long running tasks

Tweets

• Cédric Champeau lobbies for having the normal “groovy” JAR to also “jarjar” the mandatory basic dependencies of ASM, Antlr and Commons-CLI, like with the Groovy all JAR. You can vote for that JIRA issue.
• Andrés Almiray tweets his desire to see a Gradle portal plugin soon
• Dierk König tweets about Groovy being for getting things done rather than for showing off!
• groovy.io are looking for sponsors for their upcoming hackathon
• The Grain static site generator introduces dynamic rendering anywhere
• Grails provides a command to generate a zip file to attach to a JIRA issue if you need to file a bug report with a reproducible problem
• Gradle 1.11-rc1 is available through GVM
• The Grails force-ssl plugin adds an @SSLRequired annotation
• Dan Woods published a new plugin for Grails for simplifying & streamlining the implementation of RESTful renderers

Other news

• Week 5 of the Grails diary by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen

Books

• The Groovy 2 Cookbook has its dedicated website
• A short review of the “Groovy 2 cookbook” book

Events

• SkillsMatter, the organizer of the Groovy / Grails eXchange conference since 2007, have overhauled their website, and you can already see the page for the upcoming GGeX 2014 edition
• Dan Woods is speaking about Grails 2.3’s Rest capabilities on February 27th at the San Francisco Grails meetup

Releases

• The first release candidate of Spring Boot is out, including its lean Groovy support
• Grain releases are now available in Maven Central
• Andrés Almiray released version 0.3.0 of his Gipsy AST transformation for simplifying usage of the service provider interface system

Articles

• Pivotal posted Guillaume Laforge’s article on the 3 million downloads of Groovy last year and his analysis
• Kyle Boon describes how to use meta-annotations to reduce boilerplate code
• GVM, the Groovy enVironment Manager, is featured on the methods and tools website, thanks to an article from Marco Vermeulen
• At SpringOne2GX 2013, Ryan Vanderwerf explains how to create and deploy a Grails application on AWS VPC using various services such as RDS, S3, autoscaling, S3FS, EBS, etc.
• An infographic from Cygnet Infotech about 6 reasons why Grails is an awesome Java Web framework
• Bert Van Den Brande writes about using Spring Boot with Groovy

Presentations

• ZeroTurnaround published a decision maker’s comparison of Maven, Gradle and Ant + Ivy
• Simpler stored procedures with Groovy by Jeff Sheets from Object Partners
• Burt Beckwith explains the general process of creating a Grails plug-in, the different types of plug-ins, and how to deploy, release and test them.
• Will Buck provides advice for those interested to upgrade their applications from Grails 1.x to 2.x
• Venkat Subramaniam shows how to implement several design patterns, including some GoF ones, using Groovy’s dynamic nature and closures.
• Jim Driscoll shows how to create Napili, a small program accepting user scripts to control a turtle using GroovyShell, the Binding, overriding behavior with set/getVariable and invokeMethod, and more, recorded at GR8Conf US 2013

Mailing-list discussions

• Lari Otari from the Grails team is calling for feedback on areas where the Grails unit testing support could be improved

Tweets

• Surge in popularity for Gradle in the ZeroTurnaround analysis
• Cédric Champeau succeeded making Groovy build with JDK 8, a first step forward to adding further Java 8 support in Groovy
• Johannes Link is reworking his @TailRecursive AST transformation for integration in Groovy 2.3
• A funny GORM-like tweet to encourage people to order the second edition of the Grails quick-start guide book

Jobs

• A remote Grails engineer for Wixab

Other news

• As usual, the the Grails Diary is out, week 5 of 2014, by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen
• A new look for the GR8Conf Europe website

Books

• The final chapters of Grails in Action, 2nd edition are now in Manning’s Early Access Program. Peter Ledbrook tells us issues can be reported in their GitHub issue tracker (https://github.com/GrailsInAction/graina2/issues)

Events

• First meetup of the GR8 Ladies of Minneapolis on January 29th
• The Call for Papers for the GR8Conf Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 2nd-4th 2014) and GR8Conf US (Minneapolis, USA, on July 28th-29th 2014) conferences is now open
• The Call for Papers for the Greach conference (Madrid, Spain, on March 28th and 29th 2014) is also open, till January 31st

Back in 2012, I was pretty happy and proud to see Groovy being used more and more, and reaching 1.7 million downloads in 2012. But the competition with other alternative language, I was personally not sure how those figures would evolve over the course of 2013. Fortunately, thanks to the hard work of the Groovy core development team and the friendly community and ecosystem, I’m happy to report an impressive ongoing growth for 2013: Groovy crosses the 3 million downloads a year mark!

We all know the Groovy community is super active, buzzing with useful projects in the ecosystem, but it’s always interesting to see how our projects evolve in terms of usage. Guillaume Laforge, project lead of Groovy, computed some download statistics for Groovy, and showed Groovy almost doubled its downloads, from 1.7 million downloads in 2012 up to 3 million downloads in 2013! All that, thanks to the hard work of the Groovy core team and the friendly and supportive community.

Here’s the fourth edition of the Groovy Weekly column! The holidays are gone, and tons of news are here for your consumption.

Releases

• Jim Northrop released Caelyf 1.1.2, the lightweight Groovy web toolkit for Cloud Foundry

Articles

• Guillaume Laforge wrote a small tutorial on how to deploy a Ratpack application to Cloud Foundry, with a dedicated buildpack developed by Ben Hale
• Cédric Champeau blogs about the upcoming closure parameter type inference for Groovy
• Guillaume Laforge shares the notes of the last Groovy developer meeting in London prior to the Groovy Grails eXchance conference, covering various topics about the roadmap of Groovy 2.3 and Groovy 3.0.
• Peter Niederwieser authored a document explaining how to contribute to the development of the Spock testing framework
• Ken Kousen uses Groovy, POGOs, GSON and the Open Weather API
• Dustin Marx blogs about identifying Gradle conventions
• Noam Tenne explains how to register new Spring beans in Grails at runtime
• New Relic, the app performance management solution, adds Groovy and Grails support to its Java agent
• There’s now a TestFairy plugin for Gradle, to test Android application with the TestFairy platform
• Amit Jain from IntelliGrape, organizers of the GrailsConf India conference, is listing 15 reasons why developers should use the Grails web application framework
• Amit Jain from IntelliGrape is writing about Spock’s @ConfineMetaClassChanges annotation to make writing grails unit test easier
• The social value of Groovy and Grails in Brazil by Henrique Lobo Weissmann
• Dustin Marx explains how to customize the Gradle Java plugin
• Stergios Papadimitriou shows that Fast Fourier Transforms can be performed in GroovyLab faster than plain C, and as fast as optimized C routines
• Peter Ledbrook updated the Grails Searchable plugin installation instructions to show how to make it work with Grails 2.3
• Ondrej Kvasnovsky blogs about Grails integration with Vaadin
• A basic introduction to Groovy Closures by Alex Staveley

Presentations

• Grails and the realtime web, presented by Stéphane Maldini at SpringOne2GX 2013
• Jeff Brown presented polyglot web development with Grails 2, during SpringOne 2GX 2013
• Steve Pember discusses the architecture, the frameworks and Responsive Design principles to be employed while building a single-page JavaScript application., and why use Grails for that. Presented at GR8Conf US 2013

Screencasts

• Screencast of the awesome support of Gradle in IntelliJ IDEA 13

Mailing-list discussions

• Andrés Almiray follows up on the status of Griffon 2.0

Tweets

• A possible Spock contribution could be the development of a new website for Spock using the Ratpack web framework
• Peter Ledbrook mentions that the Lazybones templates for Ratpack are now managed in the Ratpack project. Also, new versions are available for the Ratpack 0.9.0 release
• Burt Beckwith warns Grails users to avoid save(failOnError: true) as exceptions are costly, as demonstrated in this article on the cost of using exceptions
• Baruch Sadogursky is a fan of the Ratpack framework and found its website one of the most stylish

Google+ post

• Mark Perry shows example of “lenses” and “state monads” for some more advanced functional programming with Groovy

Code snippet

• Václav Pech demonstrates use of GPars lazyTasks to lazily and asynchronously load mutually dependent components into memory
• Tim Yates rewrites Carin Meier’s (@gigasquid) fun presentation on Monads in Groovy
• Mike Mitterer shows how to show the Git tag version in your Gradle build version
• Tim Yates is also playing with functional lenses in Groovy

Jobs

• Looking for a Grails job in Gibraltar?
• A Grails engineering job at WIBAX in Milan, Italy

Other news

• As usual, the the Grails Diary is out, week 2 of 2014, by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen

Books

• Dave Klein and Ben Klein’s book, “Grails 2: A Quick-Start Guide”, is now in print and shipping
• Packt Publishing is looking for reviewers for the Groovy 2 Cookbook book

Events

• Luke Daley is returning to his native Australia, but before leaving, he’ll be giving one last talk at the London Groovy Grails User Group on Gradle, Ratpack and more, on January 20th
• The Call for Papers for the GR8Conf Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 2nd-4th 2014) and GR8Conf US (Minneapolis, USA, on July 28th-29th 2014) conferences is now open
• The Call for Papers for the Greach conference (Madrid, Spain, on March 28th and 29th 2014) is also open, till January 31st

Happy New Year best wishes are still flowing around, and new year resolutions have been sealed, but despite the busy times and good moments spent with our families, the Groovy ecosystem is still abuzz with news! You’d think it’d be a quiet third edition of the Groovy Weekly column, but no, we’ve all been busy with Groovy stuff! So what’s in store?

Releases

• Ratpack 0.9.0 has been released
• Peter Ledbrook published version 0.6 of Lazybones with support for multiple template engines
• Gernot Starke released v1.0 of pdfStamper, a small Griffon / Groovy-based utility to add page / chapter / header to pdf files
• Ken Krebs released his version of gsheets, a lightweight DSL wrapper over Apache POI, that is intended to make extracting data from, or pushing data to spreadsheets simple and declarative. It can be used with Groovy 1.8, Grails 2 and Java 6+.
• Yoshiya Hinosawa created a Gradle plugin for CoverAlls.IO, a service which gathers your code coverage for history and analytics purpose

Articles

• Alex Staveley covers Groovy’s “smooth operators”: Elvis, spaceship, safe navigation, spread, field access, method references
• Mark Perry blogs about referentially transparent input / output in Groovy
• Ben Limmer explains how to automatically publish to Sonatype with Gradle and Travis CI
• Michael Scharhag covers how to use Hibernate filters in Grails
• Cyril Mottier shows the Android Gradle build in action

Presentations

• In this SpringOne2GX presentation, Hans Dockter discusses build systems from a declarative vs. imperative perspective, the importance of a rich execution model and problems with POM, providing examples from Gradle, Maven and Ant
• Ken Sipe spoke about Spock during the JavaZone conference and covers mocking, stubbing and spying with Spock
• At GR8Conf US 2013, Marco Vermeulen explains using Cucumber and Groovy to apply BDD to a project, using Gherkin for writing scenarios, Groovy for step definitions, Spock for new features, and running Cucumber features
• At SpringOne2GX 2013, in his Application Architecture in Groovy talk, Dan Woods presented the strengths and flexibility in Groovy, including its dynamic nature, categories and mixins, to create a powerful, maintainable, and simple application architecture
• At GR8Conf US 2013, Zan Thrash advises on using some of the Node.js tools in order to improve Grails development: lint, concat, minify, testing JavaScript files, etc.

Mailing-list discussions

• Andrés Almiray gives a status on the future Griffon 2.0 and asks for feedback

Tweets

• Lazybones 0.6 is available through GVM
• Peter Ledbrook is adding Handlebars templating support to Lazybones
• Peter Ledbrook has pushed the Groovy Handlebars template engine into Bintray JCenter
• Anton Arhipov tweeted about the latest update of the GMaven Groovy Maven plugin
• Work has started on getting Ratpack in the TechEmpower framework benchmark
• Testing Ratpack modules and subsystem in isolations
• reStructuredText support via JRst and PegDown markdown parser are integrated into 0.6.0-SNAPSHOT of the Grain static website generator

Code snippet

• Kenneth Endfinger wished us all a Happy New Year with some Groovy asciiart (snippet)!

Jobs

• Antony Jones is looking for Grails contractors in London

Other news

• First Grails diary of the year by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen
• The Ratpack reference documentation has just had a facelift

Events

• GrailsConf India, organized by IntelliGrape Software, is taking place in New Delhi, India, on January 11th
• The Call for Papers for the GR8Conf Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 2nd-4th 2014) and GR8Conf US (Minneapolis, USA, on July 28th-29th 2014) conferences is now open
• The Call for Papers for the Greach conference (Madrid, Spain, on March 28th and 29th 2014) is also open, till January 31st
• Russel Winder is going to present a workshop on Spock at the Nordev conference
• Guillaume Laforge is speaking at JFokus 2014 about how to benefit form using Groovy, when, why and how
• Cédric Champeau is speaking (in French, at the Riviera Groovy/Grails user group) about how to contribute to Groovy

Don’t forget you can contribute to this weekly column of Groovy news, and that you can subscribe through a newsletter.

For the second Groovy Weekly column, on the eve of a new year, I’d like to wish you a very Groovy year, and share with you the following links, hoping you’ll have some spare time to look into them while you’re celebrating.

Releases

• A new project appeared on the Groovy ecosystem radar: Grain, announced by Victor Vlasenko on the Groovy mailing-list. Grain is a promising lightweight and yet powerful static website generator for Groovy which purpose is to make demanding site implementation an intuitive and enjoyable. Grain framework is equally well-suited for any static website, whether it is a complex and sophisticated company site or a simple and neat blog. The framework applies elegant website building concepts and allows to develop rapidly by making and seeing changes on the fly.
• Kunal Dabir created a Lazybone template for creating Groovy libraries readily publishable to Bintray, CI with Travis-CI, with a Gradle build and wrapper, a .gitignore file and more.
• Last week we mentioned the release of CodeNarc 0.20, and the associated CodeNarc Eclipse plugin has also been released
• Andrés Almiray released Gipsy, an AST transformation to simplify the use of the Service Provider Interface, similar to the Jipsy annotation processing toolkit he also created:
• Stergios Papadimitriou shares with us his project, GroovyLab, a MATLAB-like environment for the Java Virtual Machine. GroovyLab is an open source project based on the Groovy language. GroovyLab is efficient and can be an interesting open-source alternative to commercial packages, especially for the scientific community familiar with Java. The article introduces the architecture of GroovyLab and presents some examples of using GroovyLab to do useful work.

Articles

• A very extensive Groovy / Grails eXchange wrapdown post by Dan Woods covering all the talks he attended in detail
• Dustin Marx covers some Gradle command-line conveniences
• Dustin Marx reviews the book by Tim Berglund: “Gradle, beyond the basics”

Presentations from SpringOne2GX

• In this presentation on InfoQ, recorded at SpringOne2GX, Burt Beckwith discusses performing transactions in Grails, covering services, customizing transaction attributes (isolation, propagation levels), two-phase commit, using JMS, and testing the code
• Again recorded at SpringOne2GX, Paul King speaks about leveraging Groovy for capturing business rules, illustrated with various DSLs written in Groovy, highlighting several logic solving APIs and looks at the pros and cons of the various approaches (including tool support, flexibility, lock-in)

Interviews

• Stephen Chin interviews Luke Daley during the Devoxx conference, about Ratpack, Gradle, Geb

Mailing-list discussions

• Thibault Kruse discusses possible improvements to the groovysh command-line shell in this mailing-list discussion. Don’t hesitate to provide your input!

Tweets

• Luke Daley mentions his testing of the Waffle.IO service (a nice kanban board representation of Github issues) to organize and keep track of the backlog, ongoing development of Ratpack
• Dan Woods joins the Ratpack project as a new committer
• Ratpack now supports “fat jar” deployment
• Bert van den Brande used the Gradle Shadow plugin to create an executable JAR in no time
• Václav Pech, GPars project lead, is sprinkling a few Groovy’s few @DelegatesTo annotations over the GPars codebase operators to make them more @CompileStatic-friendly

Job

• Dan Woods relays the job post from @good_technology that is looking for a Grails developer in San Francisco, with mobile skills as well

Other news

• The last Grails diary of the year from by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen, if you want to be up-to-date on all Grails plugins news
• Bobby Warner contributes support for the PATCH method to the Ratpack project

Events

• GrailsConf India, organized by IntelliGrape Software, is taking place in New Delhi, India, on January 11th
• The Call for Papers for the GR8Conf Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 2nd-4th 2014) and GR8Conf US (Minneapolis, USA, on July 28th-29th 2014) conferences is now open
• The Call for Papers for the Greach conference (Madrid, Spain, on March 28th and 29th 2014) is also open, till January 31st

Happy New Year!

Almost the end of the year! On behalf of the Groovy development team, let me wish you the best and grooviest year for 2014!