After sharing my slides for the DSL talk, and the Groovy update presentation, I’ll finish the tour with my presentation on Gaelyk.

I’m quite disappointed by Google App Engine’s new pricing model.

I was aware of the changes, the upcoming prices and quotas, but I wasn’t expecting my small low-trafic apps to go beyond the free quotas, and force me to have to pay for those small Gaelyk apps!

The big problem is the cost of the “frontend instance hours”. An app running all the time, with low trafic, but enough to keep a frontend instance running all day will cost you 30 bucks a month with this new pricing policy.

I’m very happy to announce the final release of Gaelyk 1.0, the lightweight Groovy toolkit for Google App Engine!
It took some time to get to 1.0, but it’s now here, with the key feature I’ve been missing since the beginning of the project, in particular the Query DSL which allows you to write queries like this one:

def latestArticles = datastore.execute {  
    select all from articles  
    sort desc by dateCreated  
    where author == params.author  
    limit 10  
}

If you want to learn more about this lightweight framework, head over to: http://gaelyk.appspot.com/
You can learn everything through the tutorial.

It was time I rebooted my old blog! It used to be in PHP, and it’s time to move to the next millenium with a blog engine written in Groovy, using the Gaelyk lightweight toolkit, and deployed on Google App Engine.

I’m very pleased to announce the release of Gaelyk 0.6.

This new version is a pretty significant milestone, both in terms of features and quality. We’re really approaching a final 1.0 version!

Here’s a list of the novelties, updates, and bug fixes.

• Updated to GAE SDK 1.4.0 and Groovy 1.7.6
• Channel service added in the binding and added a convenient method for sending messages
• Ability to specify the “warmup request” handler through a route definition
• Added app.gaelyk.version in the binding
• Use a servlet context listener for initializing the plugin system
• Initial support for the asynchronous datastore
• Updated the task queue enhancements to use the new package (as task queues migrated from labs)
• Introduced a Gradle build script for building Gaelyk itself
• Increased the code coverage of the project to over 82%
• Added before{} request and after{} request lifecycle hooks to plugins
• Added initial Eclipse project files in the template project
• Fixed a bug with ignore URL routes which triggered NPEs after the capabilities routing was added
• Corrected typos in the tutorials

Be careful, however, as there are two breaking changes compared to previous versions:

I’m pleased to announce the release of Gaelyk 0.4.4!

What’s new?

• Updated the Google App Engine SDK to the latest 1.3.7 version
• Jabber and incoming email groovlets now have their implicit logger (gaelyk.email and gaelyk.jabber)
• Plugins are now impacting Jabber and incoming email groovlets as well
• Fixed a bug the conversion of String to Datastore’s Category type
• Internal refactorings of the caching logic
• Added namespace support for multitenancy, added in SDK 1.3.7:
  • a namespace is added in the binding, pointing at NamespaceManager, the SDK class dealing with namespaces
  • a new method namespace.of("customerA") { ... } to execute a closure in the context of a specific namespace

Although I haven’t mentioned it in the notes above (on on the download page), some of the internal refactorings of the caching and routing logic have also helped solving problems with the blobstore support. Please report back to me if it’s working as expected, for text content as well as binary content stored in blobstore (the latter was problematic in 0.4.3).

I’m back from Devoxx, where I had a very pleasant stay, nice discussions with many attendees and speakers, and it’s always a great opportunity to meet friends you haven’t seen in a while! And this time, I was there with my friend Patrick Chanezon from Google, to speak about Google App Engine, Groovy and Gaelyk. I’ve uploaded our slides on Slideshare, and you can view them embedded here on this blog:

Google App Engine Java, Groovy and Gaelyk

Following the conference-driven development principle, right in time for the Devoxx conference and my session with my friend Patrick Chanezon on Google App Engine Java and Gaelyk/Groovy, I’ve just released a new version (0.3) of the Gaelyk lightweight Groovy toolkit for Google App Engine.

This new version fixes a bug, adds some new capabilities, and bring a small change:

• The Google services bound to the Groovlets and templates through the binding have been renamed (except userService) to remove the service suffix
• There are some new methods for working with the memcache service, so you can use the map notation (subscript) to access elements of the cache, as well as using the ‘in’ keyword to check whether a key is present in the cache.
• Since GAE SDK 1.2.6, incoming email support has been added, so Gaelyk 0.3 also adds support for incoming emails.
• There was an issue since the birth of Gaelyk with sending emails, it has now been fixed.

Please make sure to check the tutorial, as it’s been updated with new sections on these changes and new features.

Gaelyk is a lightweight toolkit for developing and deploying applications on Google App Engine.

As Google recently released an updated version of their Google App Engine SDK, providing support for XMPP/Jabber messaging and Task Queues, I’ve worked on a new Gaelyk version providing support for these new features, with a Groovy touch.

Gaelyk can be downloaded here: http://gaelyk.appspot.com/download/

You can have a look at the latest tutorial updated with coverage of:

• sending / receiving XMPP/Jabber messages,
• using Task Queues,
• also an example of how to do queries on the datastore has been added. Read the tutorial here: http://gaelyk.appspot.com/tutorial/

The Gaelyk website uses that new version of Gaelyk, as well as the latest 1.2.5 SDK for Google App Engine. The Groovy Web Console will also be updated shortly to use that new version.