Groovy Weekly #4

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