Groovy Weekly #2

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!