Groovy Weekly #6

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