Groovy Weekly #33

You probably remember Groovy and Gradle being selected in RebelLabs’ report as part of the 10 “kick-ass” technologies developers love? But I’m also happy to report that Groovy won the Geek Choice Award, showing how groovy Groovy is!

GR8Conf US 2014 last week is delivering tons of great videos and materials from all the speakers that came to the conference, and I hope you’ll find time to watch a few. My personal highlight was the great Q&A talk by Scott Hickey and Jim McGill on looking back into 9 years of using Groovy at a big US insurance company. Don’t miss it!

Also, if you missed GR8Conf US 2014, remember there’s SpringOne2GX fast approaching, and the early bird price for registering to the conference ends August 9th, so be quick!

Last but not least, the Groovy Weekly schedule will slow down a little this month, as I’ll take some vacations! So I might be skipping a beat or two in the agenda, but fear not, Groovy Weekly will come back in full force in September!

Releases

• Grails 2.4.3 is out
• Ratpack 0.9.7 released, with the new Groovy markup template engine, continued work on Reactive Streams, usage of the Gradle Shadow plugin
• Renato Athaydes is releasing v1.2 of the Spock reports project

News

• Groovy wins Geek Choice Award, following up RebelLabs study of the 10 kick-ass technologies developers love
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen published week 31 of the Grails Diary

Articles

• A tutorial for a REST / grid-driven application with Ratpack, Angular.JS and CoffeeScript, as well as a comparison with Grails
• A demo using Groovy, Ratpack, the Gradle plugin, and GrooScript
• Robert Peszek writes that he doesn’t like Hibernate and Grails in part one
• Robert Peszek continues in part two with the problems he encounters with Hibernate and Grails
• Getting started guide with Grails on App42 platform as a service
• Andrés Almiray comes back on Jacoco and Coveralls in his Gradle Glam series
• MrHaki’s Groovy goodness: Relax… Groovy Will Parse Your Wicked JSON
• MrHaki’s Grails goodness:
  • use Spring Java configuration
  • using Bintray JCenter as repository
  • load beans in Java configuration based on Grails environment
• JaxEnter comes back on the Gradle 2 release and the interview they made with Guillaume Laforge at the JAX conference
• Static site generation with Grain by Mike Hostetler
• Meta-Object Protocol and interceptors In Grails by Jasgeet Singh
• Grails unit test filters with the injected service

Presentations

• Julien Viet on CRaSH, the shell for the Java Virtual Machine, recorded at GR8Conf Europe 2014
• GR8Conf US 2014 specials
  • The GR8Conf US 2014 videos will appear progressively on YouTube and the slides on Github
  • A look back at the 9 years of Groovy at the Mutual of Omaha insurance company by Scott Hickey and Jim McGill
  • The now famous Groovy Puzzlers talk by Baruch Sadogursky and Andrés Almiray
  • Guillaume Laforge published his slide deck about “Groovy in 2014 and beyond”
  • The Grails asset pipeline by Ted Naleid
  • Groovy Vampires: Groovy, REST, NoSQL and Bad Marketing by Ken Kousen
  • Experiences using Grails in a micro-service architecture by Jeff Beck
  • Hibernate metrics: paying attention to the ORM behind the curtain by David Kuster
  • Spock, a logical framework for enterprise testing by Ken Kousen
  • Functional testing your Grails app with Geb by Collin Harrington
  • Vagrant by Kyle Boon at GR8Conf US 2014
  • Introduction to graph databases and Neo4J by Stefan Armbruster
  • Polyglot web programming with Grails by Jeff Brown
  • Angular.JS for the Grails enthusiast by Will Buck
  • Fine-grained security in Grails presented by Andrew Miller

Google+ posts

• The Groovy markup template engine used as an alternative Magnolia CMS renderer

Tweets

• GVM has passed 60,000 unique installs!
• Backward and binary compatibility is an important concern for the Groovy project, and Cédric Champeau just developed a Gradle plugin integrated in the Groovy build to create reports of binary compatibility between Groovy versions
• Grails 2.4.3 available through GVM
• Groovy 2.4.0-beta-2 available through GVM
• The Ratpack project publishes its test coverage and ask for help for improving it
• David Norton asks the question: how many actuaries in the world can put Groovy on their résumés?
• Ratpack reminds us its got a forum for user support
• Senthil Gopal really enjoyed the Groovy puzzlers by Baruch Sadogursky and Andrés Almiray at GR8Conf US 2014
• The JavaFX FXPlayground has added support for Groovy
• Andrés Almiray remarks the ongoing growth of Griffon plugins
• Robert Guerra is having fun with Ratpack and ElasticSearch
• Discussing with Robert Fletcher reminded us of Groovy Koans, for getting acquainted with Groovy
• The Ratpack.io website is powered by the Groovy markup template engine
• Andrés Almiray is using the Gradle Git plugin to easily push content to Github’s pages

Code snippets

• Laurent Huet shows how to get the list of twitter followers with Groovy and the Twitter4J library
• Jack Holt created a Spring MVC 4 demo using Groovy

Events

• Early bird for SpringOne2GX 2014 ends August 9th, be quick!
• Bagalore Groovy meetup next saturday