I started blogging 20 years ago, in April 2003. My first blog engine was a PHP CMS, called Nucleus. I was hosting it on my ISP, at free.fr.

Then in 2011, I wrote my own blog engine, called Bloogaey, which was written in Groovy, using my little Gaelyk web framework, and running on App Engine.

As it became a bit painful to properly format my blog posts, and evolve my blog engine, I decided I should move to something that is more static, with a static site generator that eats Markdown files: I chose the Hugo static site generator that I used in some previous projects. And I’m now hosting the content of my blog in Github Pages, under the glaforge.dev custom domain name.

Back to GR8Conf Europe in Denmark, for the yearly Groovy community reunion! I had the chance to present two talks.

The first one on Google’s Machine Learning APIs, with samples in Groovy using vision recognition, speech recognition & generation, natural language analysis. I’ll come back on ML in Groovy in forthcoming articles.

And the second talk was an overview of Google Cloud Platform, focusing on the compute and storage options, with demos using Groovy frameworks (Ratpack, Gaelyk, and the newly released Micronaut) and how to deploy apps on Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, App Engine. I’ll also come back in further articles on those demos, but in the meantime, I wanted to share my slide deck with you all! Without further ado, here’s what I presented:

After my Twitter sentiment article, those past couple of days, I’ve been playing again with the Cloud Natural Language API. This time, I wanted to make a little demo analyzing the text of speeches and remarks published by the press office of the White House. It’s interesting to see how speeches alternate negative and positive sequences, to reinforce the argument being exposed.

As usual, for my cloud demos, my weapons of choice for rapid development are Apache Groovy, with Glide & Gaelyk on Google App Engine! But for this demo, I needed two things:

What’s the mood on Twitter today? Looking at my little twitter demo from a few weeks ago (using Glide & Gaelyk on Google App Engine), I thought I could enrich the visualization with some sentiment analysis to give more color to those tweets. Fortunately, there’s a new API in Google-town, the Cloud Natural Language API (some more info in the announcement and a great post showing textual analysis of Harry Potter and New York Times)!

The brand-new Cloud Natural Language API provides three key services:

Back in 2009, I created Gaelyk, a lightweight toolkit for developing Google App Engineapps using the Apache Groovyprogramming language. I even had the chance to speak at Google I/O 2009about it! Good times, good times… Vladimír Oranýlater joined me in maintaining and evolving Gaelyk, and Kunal Dabircreated the fun Glide project, which is a thin wrapper around Gaelyk to further streamline the development of small to mid-sized apps for Google App Engine.

Today, I want to share with you a quick start guide to develop a little app, that shows some tweets from selected accounts with the Twitter API(thanks to Twitter4J), and using the Material Design Light template for the look’n feel (I used the “dashboard” template). I won’t list all the exact steps, all the precise changes made to the templates, etc, but I want to give you the keys for having a productive experience with Glide and Gaelyk on App Engine. And here’s a screenshot of what we’ll be building:

This is with great pleasure that the Gaelyk team announces the release of Gaelyk 2.0, the lightweight toolkit for developing applications on Google App Engine with the Groovy dynamic language.

For the impatient, go directly to the download page!

It’s been long in the making, and there are quite a lot of new features to speak about, like the migration to Groovy 2.1 and GAE 1.8, the new Search DSL, improvements to the URL routing system, various performance optimizations, and more.

Along with the release of Gaelyk 1.2, I’d like to share two interesting links about running functional tests with Geb, and concurrency / parallelism with GPars on Gaelyk.
Gaelyk functional testing with Geb

In the Groovy ecosystem, we’re all aware of the Spock testing framework. On top of Spock, you can use the Geb browser automation library, to easily create functional tests for your web applications, in a nice, readable and expressive fashion.

Thanks to Marcin Erdmann, the Gradle GAE plugin (used by the Gaelyk template project) has been enhanced with support for running functional tests with Spock and Geb. Marcin (who’s blog is actually a fork of my Bloogaey app) has written a small tutorial on how to get started.

I’m very pleased to announce the release of Gaelyk 1.2!

For the impatient, you’ll be able to find the new JAR and Template Project here, as well as the changelog: http://gaelyk.appspot.com/download

You’ll notice that the new template project uses Twitter Bootstrap now, to make it a bit fancier and nicer on the eye!

We also upgraded to the latest and greatest of Groovy and App Engine’s SDK.

In terms of new features, I’d like to particularly highlight:

In a recent article, I was complaining about the new Google App Engine pricing policy. Obviously, as I have a few applications deployed on App Engine, and as I’m developing Gaelyk, a lightweight toolkit for this platform, I was worried about being heavily affected by those changes.

In this article, I’d like to do a short summary of my experience so far.

I have close to 10 applications deployed on Google App Engine. Most are just demos that nobody ever accesses. But three of them are quite important to me:

Gaelyk 1.1 has just been released!
Gaelyk is a lightweight toolkit for writing and deploying Groovy apps on Google App Engine.
In this version, all the components have been updated to their latest versions:

• Groovy 1.8.4
• GAE SDK 1.6.0

This blog is now running Gaelyk 1.1 pretty happily!
You should be able to see the announcement on the Gaelyk Google group for the details, but here’s the list of changes:

• Upgraded to Groovy 1.8.4 and App Engine SDK 1.6.0

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