Groovy Weekly #3

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

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