No big highlight this week, but still plenty to learn from!

We have some minor releases, interesting articles on Spock, on how to leverage traits with Geb, some thoughts on reactive programming, new demos and tutorials for GrooScript.

And we can wish a happy birthday to the GR8 Ladies!

Releases

• Spring Tool Suite & Groovy Grails Tool Suite 3.6.2 released
• GrooScript 0.6.1 released
• GridGain 0.6.2 with better support of themes that use plain CSS and better handling of large files
• Spring Boot 1.1.8 released
• Spring Boot 1.2.0.M2 released
• Gretty 1.1.4 released
• Alain Stalder released an extensive manual for his Grengine, his alternative approach to integrating Groovy in your applications

Articles

• MrHaki’s Spocklight: indicate class under test with @Subject annotation
• MrHaki’s Groovy Goodness: Closure as a Class
• Kyle Boon is leveraging Groovy traits with Geb
• Luke Daley explains executional flexibility through reactive programming
• A follow-up post from Andrés Almiray on the new desktop application framework JSR
• Savant, a new Groovy-powered build tool?

Presentations

• Groovy introduction slides by the GR8 Ladies
• Colin Harrington on web security

News

• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 41

Interview

• Interview of Hans Dockter on Gradle and continuous delivery

Tweets

• Groovy makes Android code much more concise
• The GR8 Ladies celebrate their first birthday!
• Joe Wolf notes that Groovy reached 10,000 questions on Stack Overflow
• Eugene Kamenev is investigating bring GORM-like features for Groovy on Android<, to deal with building UI, handling validation, and more
• Youri Ackx liked Guillaume Laforge’s funny slide from his JavaOne presentation about how to represent map / reduce, sandwich-style
• Ratpack adds more Promise operations and improved the documentation
• Dierk König says the builder pattern in Groovy is a great example of the state monad
• Graeme Rocher waves goodbye to the old Grails build system
• Gradle features a handful of plugins for JavaScript / front-end build automation
• One could wish all front end development be done with Groovy and GrooScript?
• Spring Boot 1.1.8 available through GVM
• Spring Boot 1.2.0.M2 available through GVM

Code snippets

• GrooScript for client-side templating with the HTML builder or with Groovy templates

Events

• Baruch Sadogursky will be speaking about AST transformations at JavaDay Kiev and will wow the crowds with Groovy Puzzlers at JavaDay Kiev and Jokerconf!
• Iván López will be talking about “Metaprogramming with Groovy” at GeeCON Prague next 23rd October
• The Greach conference is being prepared and is taking shape, and the organizers are looking for sponsors
• GR8Conf Europe 2015 is in the works, as the team reunites

Back from JavaOne, where the Groovy project received its “Best Tech - Geek Choice Awards” from ZeroTurnaround, and where it win the Script Bowl competion this year again!

Releases

• Griffon 2.0.0 final released!
• Ratpack 0.9.9 is out moving to Java 8 as a base requirement
• Alain Stalder releases Grengine, another approach to running and embedding Groovy
• RxGroovy 1.0.0-RC-1 was released with a new artifact ID

Articles

• Marcin Zajączkowski comes back with Part 2 of what’s coming up in Spock 1.0
• Andrés Almiray explains it’s time for a desktop application framework JSR
• Trisha Gee is using Groovy to insert XML into MongoDB
• Hans Dockter published the Gradleware July-September newsletter
• André Steingreß writes about principals tracking in Grails
• Part 8 of the series “I don’t like Hibernate / Grails”
• A Spock quick tip for Grails integration tests from André Steingreß
• Quick Gradle tip: setting Bintray attributes for Gradle plugins
• Tomás Lin on Spring Boot and Webjars: overwriting configuration during runtime
• Burt Beckwith answers a Stack Overflow question on overriding Grails’ default create-app files

Presentations

• Ixchel Ruiz and Andrés Almiray demonstrated the funky-ness of Groovy at JavaOne 2014
• Cédric Champeau presented “rethinking API design with traits in Groovy” at JavaOne 2014
• Guillaume Laforge posted his JavaOne 2014 slides about “Groovy in the light of Java 8”
• Guillaume Laforge published his slides about “Groovy in 2014 and beyond” from JavaOne 2014
• Guillaume Laforge presented Groovy on Android at DroidCon Paris 2014

News

• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 39
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 40

Tweets

• Groovy reaches first place on the podium, along with Clojure, beating JRuby and Scala at JavaOne 2014’s Script Bowl competition
• Groovy received its Best Tech Geek Choice Award from ZeroTurnaround at JavaOne 2014
• Cédric Champeau is looking into integrating Sergei Egorov’s Groovy macros into Groovy 2.4
• Dierk König says the finish line is in sight for Groovy in Action, second edition
• If you use dependency classifiers (like Groovy’s “indy”) in Gradle builds with IntelliJ IDEA, you might want to vote for this issue as it’s broken in Intellij IDEA
• If you like SASS and Gradle, Danny Hyun notes there’s a plugin for that
• Russel Hart notes that as of Ratpack 0.9.9 you can stream your Hystrix metrics out to the Hystrix dashboard or Turbine
• Russel Hart remarks that Ratpack’s GroovyChainAction is replaced with Action<Chain> and the Groovy.chain() call in Ratpack 0.9.9
• Craig Burke is readying his Angular.JS Grails Lazybones template

Code snippets

• Ken Sipe’s code samples from his JavaOne 2014 Spock presentation
• More GrooScript demos available
• Ratpack promises, a comparison between Java 7 and 8

Events

• Mac Liaw will be speaking about Ratpack at 1 Dev Day Detroit
• Andrés Almiray is presenting Gradle, harder, better, stronger, faster, at Jazoon

Books

• Jon Kerridge publishes two ebooks on concurrency and parallelism and makes good use of Groovy

Here’s a short column this week, a bit in advance, as I’m flying to JavaOne tomorrow to spread the Groovy truth!

Releases

• Cédric Champeau announced the release of Groovy 2.3.7
• Spring Boot 1.1.7 released

Articles

• MrHaki’s Gradle Goodness: running Groovy scripts as application
• The reason the internet was invented or cat pictures for the win, by Ken Kousen, sprinkled with bits of Groovy JSON and Swing code
• Exporting Grails’ i18n messages into Javascript
• Andrés Almiray’s Gradle Glam on features that would benefit the Gradle community
• Jorge Martin on the inception and the Groovy Swiss Knife library for Android and the problems encountered with Android Studio’s Groovy support

Presentations

• Guillaume Laforge presented on Groovy on Android at DroidCon Paris 2014

Tweets

• Robert Fletcher noticed IntelliJ IDEA’s clever capability of properly renaming closures it parameter
• Java’s Duke is looking pretty Groovy at JavaOne!
• Groovy 2.3.7 is available on GVM
• A pretty Groovy book!
• Jon DeJong makes Groovy strongly typed by hitting the keys harder when coding!
• New component selection and replacement rules for upcoming Gradle 2.2
• Robert Guerra shows a screenshot of deployment of Ratpack with Java 8 on Heroku

Code snippets

• Cédric Champeau shows a fun snippet of code using metaprogramming to let Groovy be pretty tolerant to typos in method names

SpringOne2GX 2014 in Dallas is over. And next week starts JavaOne. It’s conference season! Speaking of which… the fine GR8Conf US crew released many more presentations this week! There’s a lot of content to go through!

Releases

• GrooScript 0.6 is out, on the road to 1.0, and Jorge Franco is looking for your feedback
• Gradle Android plugin 0.13 works with Gradle 2.1
• JBake 2.3.2 with Asciidoctor 1.5

News

• Incremental Java compilation landed in Gradle 2.1
• Grails Diary week 38 by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen

Articles

• What’s new in Spock 1.0, by Marcin Zajączkowski
• GPars remote dataflows and actors by Mario García
• Writing React.JS components in Groovy with GrooScript
• The “Grails revolution” movement is looking forward to spreading the word on how great Grails is
• What’s new with Gradle Vaadin Plugin 0.9? Groovy support!
• MrHaki’s Gradle Goodness: Adding dependencies only for packaging to war
• Multi-project code coverage using Gradle and JaCoCo by Clemens Siebler
• After his Hibernate/Grails series, Robert Peszek comes to functional programming: “My dream: software without any bugs … and is Groovy functional? How about Grails?”
• How to speed up Gradle builds? Use the daemon!

Presentations

• Guillaume Laforge presented about Groovy’s Android support at DroidCon Paris 2014
• Idiomatic Spock with Robert Fletcher recorded at Netflix
• Trisha Gee gave her Groovy / Angular.JS / HTML 5 / MongoDB talk to the Virtual JUG
• Micro-services with Groovy and Spring Boot by Marcin Grzejszczak
• GR8Conf US 2014 presentations
  • Groovy at SmartThings presented by Scott Vlaminck and Ryan Applegate
  • The Groovy Ecosystem revisited by Andrés Almiray
  • Getting started with Ratpack presented by Jeff Beck
  • Realtime Ratpack by Robert Fletcher
  • Introduction to Gradle by John Engelman
  • Grails Goodness presented by Hubert Klein Ikkink
  • Gradle Goodness presented by Hubert Klein Ikkink
  • Distributed platform development with Groovy by Robert Fletcher
  • Introduction to multithreaded programing with GPars by Jon DeJong
  • Tour de plugin, by Søren Berg Glasius
  • Grails Worst Practices by Burt Beckwith
  • Griffon, what’s new and what’s coming, by Andrés Almiray
  • How to test your Grails application presented by Colin Harrington
  • Hybrid view rendering with Grails by Robert Fletcher
  • Testing BitCoin and MasterCoin with Spock by Sean Gilligan
  • Performance tuning Grails applications by Lari Hotari
  • What’s new in the Grails Spring security plugin by Burt Beckwith
  • Application architectures in Grails by Peter Ledbrook
  • Idiomatic Spock by Robert Fletcher
  • Getting Grails into the Enterprise by Ryan Vanderwerf
  • Metaprogramming with the Groovy Runtime by Jeff Brown
  • Getting Groovy with Graphs by Stefan Armbruster
  • Serving Websockets to iOS, Android and the Web using Groovy, Spring, Angular.js, SockJs and STOMP presented by Sean Gilligan

Screencasts

• Bertrand Goetzmann publishes a screen cast of Grails with the Ionic framework demonstrating a REST API example

Tweets

• Peter Niederwieser is lobbying for fixing those issues in the IntelliJ IDEA Groovy support. Please vote for them!
• Ratpack 0.9.9 onward will require Java 8
• Ratpack ships new releases every first day of the month
• Ratpack’s RxJava support in Java 7 vs Java 8
• You can decorate your garden with Groovy flowers!
• Proper overloaded setter support is coming to Groovy
• Groovy as a gateway drug into the JVM
• With OpenJDK 8 out, Ratpack’s next release will require Java 8
• Benoît Hédiart mentions CodingGame.com: a coding game where you can program games in Groovy
• Guillaume Laforge is having fun coding an Android application in Groovy for helping her daughter to learn how to read
• Guillaume Laforge on stage at DroidCon Paris 2014 evangelizing Groovy on Android
• GroovyBlogs now displays latest blog entries and most popular ones

Code snippets

• How to create multiple Android dex files with a Gradle trick

The SpringOne2GX 2014 conference is over, but you can see below more tweets and presentations from the second part of the conference, and the videos will be available later on on InfoQ.

Apart from the excitement around Grails 3, Spring Boot, Groovy, and more, I’d like to highlight the very interesting feedback from Scott Hickey who comes back on 6 years of production usage of Groovy at Mutual of Omaha, saying “Groovy is a phenomenal language for businnes applications”, and that there’s nothing “better” on the JVM! See the first couple of tweets in the Twitter section.

Direct live from SpringOne2GX, in Dallas! So you can expect some news and presentations from the show this week and the next, and certainly tons of tweets!

Speaking of tweets from SpringOne2GX, you’ll notice the flurry of very positive and excited reactions regarding the upcoming Grails 3 release.

In the release section, don’t miss the release of Gradle 2.1.

Releases

• Gradle 2.1 released with community plugins, and incremental java compilation
• GVM 2.1 released with improved self-updates
• Swiss Army, a handy library for Groovy on Android, covering view injection, threading and more, by Jorge Martín
• Gradle 2.1 rc-4 is ready for testing
• Spring Boot 1.1.6 released
• A Groovy DSL that allows for easy definition of Asciidoctor extensions by Robert Panzer
• Asciidoctor Gradle Template 1.0.0 announced by Andrés Almiray

News

• GroovyBlogs is coming back to life thanks to Søren Berg Glasius
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen Grails Diary week 36

Articles

• Remoting comes to GPars, thanks to Google Summer of Code Rafał Sławik’s great work
• Ratpack + Docker + Gradle by Kyle Boon
• Benjamin Muschko speaks about Gradle’s support of Maven POM profiles
• “I don’t like Grails / Hibernate” goes on, covering how to save objects using refresh()

Presentations

• Gradle in the enterprise at LinkedIn at Gradle Summit 2014
• Benefit from Groovy, when, why, and how, presented by Guillaume Laforge at JFokus 2014
• The Groovy way to write Jenkins CI plugins by Shiran Rubin
• Functional programming in Groovy, by Guillaume Laforge, recorded at BreizhCamp 2014 (in French)
• How to get fully functional in Groovy, by Dierk König (in German)
• Video tutorial how Gradle is integrated in Java IDEs
• A Groovy introduction presentation by Joachim Baumann
• First slide decks published from SpringOne2GX 2014 in Dallas, Texas:
  • Cédric Champeau dived into rethinking API design with Groovy traits
  • Guillaume Laforge presented the latest state of the Groovy nation at SpringOne2GX 2014
  • Guillaume Laforge answers the question wheter Groovy is still relevant now that we have Java 8
  • Paul King speaks about working with databases in Groovy
  • Paul King covers Groovy AST transformations

Tweets

• Cédric Champeau will present “Rethinking API design with traits” at JavaOne
• Andrés Almiray will evangelize Gradle at the Jazoon conference
• Groovy 2.4 beta 3 available on GVM
• Søren Berg Glasius tells us that GroovyBlogs is coming back to life
• Gradle 2.1-rc-4 is available on GVM
• Groovy had Peter Ledbrook at “properties”
• Dan Woods believes Ratpack’s handler chain and Groovy DSL is the best combo for building restful APIs
• You can customize the GVM self-update prompt
• Ted Naleid notes that the @DirtiesRuntime test-level annotation can mark tests with metaclass changes in Grails 2.4.4
• Even during the SpringOne2GX keynote, GVM makes the show!
• All the new Groovy documentation is tested: all snippets are included from test cases.
• Lots of Grails 3 related tweets following up Graeme Rochere’s Grails 3 preview at SpringOne2GX 2014
  • The Grails 3 preview gets developers excited
  • Spring Boot 1.2.0.M1 is available on GVM
  • Grails 3 is abandoning Gant in favor of Gradle
  • Goals for Grails 3: support a plugin model, better eventing, better micro-services, based off Spring Boot, and more
  • Grails 3 will make a clean delineation between plugins, distinguishing code generation, build-time, runtime
  • Grails 3 apps can be packaged as runnable JARs
  • Grails 3 will be independent of the Servlet API
  • You can create micro-Grails applications that as simple Groovy scripts
  • Grails 3 is going to feature application profiles
  • Grails 3 will allow you to debug your controllers more easily as they are now Groovy traits
  • The roadmap for Grails 3 is to have a first milestone before the end of the year and the GA before next year’s SpringOne2GX, a year from now.

Code snippets

• Painting like Jackson Pollock, in Groovy, in the browser, thanks to GrooScript with this demo from Jorge Franco Leza
• Graeme Rocher wowed the crowds at SpringOne2GX’s keynote with a tweetable full data-driven rest application with Grails 3
• Cédric Champeau shares a Gradle tip to bypass odd VerifyErrors when you’re developing Android applications in Groovy
• Lari Hotari contributed Spring Boot support for Ratpack
• Schalk Cronjé shares a tip on how control logging running tests in Gradle
• Stéphane Nicoll shows a neat Spring Boot rabbit support from Groovy
• Grails 3 and Spring Boot integration

Events

• Devoxx 2014 will feature Groovy with Cédric Champeau speaking of Groovy on Android, and Guillaume Laforge on Groovy in the light of Java 8
• Phil Webb will be talking about Spring Boot at the Groovy Grails Centro meetup on September 23rd
• Guillaume Laforge is going to speak about Groovy in the light of Java 8 at JavaOne 2014

Books

• Interested in beta-testing an introductory Groovy and Grails book?
• 44% off of Manning’s Groovy, Grails, Spring books

The Groovy development team is happy to announce the release of a third beta for Groovy 2.4.

This release contains various bug fixes and minor improvements.

I’ll highlight the fact that you can now use multiple labels on your statements (instead of just one).

With beta-3 now, many of the unneeded synthetic methods generated by Groovy are not generated anymore, reducing the number of methods nicely yielding smaller bytecode. This is of particular interest for Android developers limited in the overall number of methods used in Android applications.

After a long summer break, it’s high time we resume Groovy Weekly, and come back to our every-Tuesday agenda! Get ready for lots of content!

If there were one particular item of news I’d like to highlight in this edition, that’s the news about the New York Times that is going to use Groovy and its Android support (in the upcoming Groovy 2.4), as well as RxJava, to revamp its Android application to make more “reactive”.

On the Groovy mailing-list, we had an interesting question about how to disable annotations like @Grab, to prevent users from downloading third-party dependencies. There are a few possibilities for that, but my favorite was to create a global AST transformation that would generate a compilation error if the @Grab annotation is found on an import.

I created a first small prototype within a script, but I used an injected local transformation to get everything working with a simple script. So I decided afterwards to do it for real this time, using a real project on Github with a proper global AST transformation this time.

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!