Groovy Weekly #16

After the Groovy knights in Madrid, at the Greach conference, the Groovy team delivers the first beta of Groovy 2.3!

An impressive feature list: including traits, official JDK 8 support, tail recursion, NIO2 module, super fast JSON support, closure type inference, a new markup template engine, and much more.

You will also notice the new documentation shaping up but the Groovy Core team still looks forward to contributions to help with this gigantic task, so don’t hesitate to voice your will to help!

Also double check the new style for GroovyDoc documentation as well as GDK documentation.

In the presentations section, don’t miss the bullet linking to all the excellent presentations given at the Greach conference.

Releases

• Guillaume Laforge announces the first beta of Groovy 2.3, and details the new features
• Groovy 2.3.0-beta-1 is available through GVM
• Spring Boot 1.0.1 is available through GVM
• Thomas Hirsch publishes a new Gradle plugin for using Geb to automate build tasks
• Glide 0.3.2 is available through GVM
• Gretty, the Gradle plugin for Jetty, released v0.0.15, with fast-reload resources, and is available from Maven Central and JCenter

Presentations

• You can watch all the videos and read the slides of all the presentations given at the Greach 2014 conference, in Madrid (Spain)
• Groovy in 2014 and beyond! — Guillaume Laforge
• Why reactive architecture will take over the world — Steve Pember
• Groovier Data History in Groovy with Event Sourcing — Steve Pember
• Grails is not my domain model. Where do I put my Business Logic — Antonio de la Torre
• Grails Worst Practices — Burt Beckwith
• Experiences using Grails in a micro service architecture — Jeff Beck
• Road to Grails 3.0 — Graeme Rocher
• Understanding GORM — Alonso Torres
• Creating RESTful API’s with Grails and Spring Security — Álvaro Sánchez-Mariscal
• Hybrid Mobile App in minutes, not days: Fast and furious II — Corinne Krych, Fabrice Matrat, Sébastien Blanc
• Startup Lesson Learned from rolling a Grails App to Millions Users — James Page
• Hexagonal Architecture in Grails — David Dawson
• DevQA: make your testers happier with Groovy, Spock and Geb — Álvaro Sánchez-Mariscal
• What’s New in spring-security-core 2.0 — Burt Beckwith

Articles

• Glu, the Groovy-based deployment and monitoring automation platform developed at LinkedIn, is featured in the DevOps.com website
• Stéphane Maldini wrote an article on Reactor for the NFJS magazine (req required)
• Craig Atkinson created a Spock cheat-sheet
• An introduction to what Groovy is
• Corinne Krych blogs about her impressions of the Greach conference in Madrid
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen, of Grails Diary fame, gives us his impressions from Greach 2014
• Closure composition in Groovy by Michael Scharhag
• Using the Instagram login API via Grails
• Angel Ruiz explains how to reference a file inside a Grails plugin

Code snippets

• Dierk König shows traits composition with an example of multiple traits inheritance
• A micro Spring Boot app in Groovy, in the span of a tweet, returning the device type used as JSON
• Initial work has landed on an integrated async HTTP client in Ratpack, which works great with RxJava
• Macro Vermeulen used Geb as a “wallpaper downloader” in this code snippet
• MrHaki shows how to convert byte arrays to hexadecimal strings
• MrHaki blogs about Groovy closures as Writable
• MrHaki covers GStrings as Writable

Tweets

• Dierk König distills the essence of Groovy’s nature in the 140 characters of a tweet!
• Dierk König remarks that Groovy 2.3 traits enable “design by capability”
• Dan Woods notes that compared to Java 8 interface default methods, Groovy 2.3 traits are stateful
• Marco Vermeulen is looking into Groovy’s traits and enjoys the new tutorial-style Groovy documentation
• Spock’s Peter Niederwieser is wondering if Groovy 2.3’s traits are the new killer feature for code reuse across specifications
• Cédric Champeau announces that the “trait” implementation has landed in the Groovy core repository
• There’s now a Gradle task to install Grain themes

News

• Pivotal opened up a page for the commercial support for their Open Source projects, including Groovy and Grails coverage
• With the release of the beta of Groovy 2.3, the GroovyDoc tool receives a face lift and produce nicer looking documentation
• The Groovy GDK documentation also gets a face lift with a more stylish look
• The brand new Groovy documentation, written with Asciidoctor, is shaping up nicely, and the Groovy team welcomes contributions to help fill in the gaps
• A twitter account to follow about the latest Gradle plugin news, by Andrés Almiray and his Gradle plugin portal effort
• Vote for this feature request for IntelliJ IDEA to provide “traits” support for the upcoming trait feature of Groovy 2.3
• The Ratpack asks for feedback on whether to make Java 8 the base requirement for Ratpack apps
• The Grails Diary week 13 by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen
• Another Grails Diary, week 14, by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen
• Masato Nagai informs us that GBench, the Groovy benchmarking utility, as its own Groovy AST DSL, which is faster than Groovy’s own AstBuilder
• SimpleCI renamed to DirectBuild, and will soon be getting Remote Agent Support
• Spring Boot 1.0 is available through GVM

Jobs

• BlueGlue, in London (UK), is seeking a senior Grails / Java developer

Events

• Barely a week left before the end of the Early Bird price (35% discount) for the GR8Conf Europe conference, in Denmark
• The GR8Conf Europe organizers are announcing the sponsors for the 2014 edition
• Jon DeJong from Object Partners will present the “New Toolchain” for building and testing single page Grails apps