Why? Because it doesn’t exist. The framework is called Grails. Just Grails. Go to http://grails.org/ and search the site. You won’t see any “Groovy on” anywhere. Seriously. Check it out. I’ll wait. I guess some history about what caused all this is in order. Back in 2005 the Grails framework was started after discussions on the Groovy mailing list about the idea of a Groovy-based JVM alternative to Ruby on Rails which was then starting to get a lot of buzz. The...more »

Rob Fletcher has been doing some great work on scaffolding. Check out this slick demo app on Cloud Foundry. It uses his Fields plugin (the successor to the bean-fields) and Twitter Bootstrap. I realized this week that I’d missed the transition of Rob’s blog to its new home and had missed some interesting posts: Organizing Functional Tests and Optional Tag Bodies. When I switched to 2.0 for development of the Spring Security Core plugin, the PDF of the docs was clipped on the...more »

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Peter Ledbrook started a HOWTO series this week for Grails; the first one is on upgrading to Grails 2.0 and there’s also a HOWTO on writing HOWTOs. We could use your help finding invalid JIRA issues (e.g. already fixed or no longer an issue). Check out the section “Reviewing issues” in the wiki page on contributing to Grails for how to use the new “Last Reviewed” and “Flagged” fields. Tomas Lin wrote up his experiences deploying Grails applications...more »

I saw James Williams’ post on Running Ratpack inside Grails earlier this week and thought that it should be implemented as a Grails plugin, so I started playing with it. There isn’t much in the way of documentation yet, but what’s there is at the plugin portal page. The source for the plugin is here if you have any fixes or suggestions. more »

When I would present on Ratpack at conferences, one of the main questions I'd get would be around the migration path from Ratpack to Grails. I'd usually answer noting that you could run Ratpack along side Grails. It turns out it is incredibly simple to run a Ratpack app inside Grails. I don't think it's a long term solution and best as an intermediary step to migrate from one side to the other.   1. Grab and build Ratpack. Provided you already have Gradle installed, run gradle...more »

You only have a few more weeks to get your talk proposals in for GR8Conf EU and US. The EU page is here and the US page is here; both conferences have a February 15th deadline. Lots of Spring Security items this week. I broke war deployment in the spring-security-core 1.2.7 release so I released version 1.2.7.1 to address that. There’s a new plugin to integrate a Shibboleth native SP, and one for mock authentication. And Carsten Block did a blog post on restricting concurrent user...more »

A few days ago I was discussing the topic of builders during a Grails training session. After surveying the usual suspects found in the standard Groovy distribution (MarkupBuilder, SwingBuilder, Antbuilder and ObjectGraphBuilder) we jumped into Grails' DomainBuilder. Once we got familiar with it the team seized the opportunity to refactor an existing application they've been working on for a few weeks. The idea was to remove a very verbose data setup during the bootstrap sequence. Like many...more »

Apple, at their recent event announcement, unveiled a new innovation in the textbook market with iBooks Author. Most of the words around this event use flowery language of how groundbreaking it is and how it will change the market. I think it stands to do more damage to the market than help.   Let's start with the ridiculous EULA, Apple requires any work that is created with iBooks Author(IBA) to be sold only in the Apple iBooks store. Apple doesn't have the right to tell me where I...more »

Gr8Conf Europe announced a new look this week for their site (based on Weceem) and that their Call for Papers is open. If you want to speak in Copenhagen be sure to get your proposals in by the February 15th deadline. The plugin portal got a few new features recently. Plugin pages now display the syntax for declaring the plugin in BuildConfig.groovy instead of using install-plugin. For example the spring-security-core plugin’s value is compile ":spring-security-core:1.2.7". Plugins that...more »

Note Note: Vote on these JIRA's if you would like STS to be able to import Spring Security without use of the command line. Introduction This blog will teach you how to run the sample applications/tests for Spring Security 3.1.x in STS. It is assumed that you have already installed STS. Since STS is a flavor of Eclipse, the process for doing this in Eclipse is similar. The main goal is to demonstrate how to setup a workspace with STS. In later posts I will describe how to run the...more »

This week I'm answering questions about HTML5 and Game Programming in general over at CodeRanch. Wednesday's questions seems to be dominated by inquiries of cross-browser feature compatibility with several variants.   *Q: What are some device considerations when making HTML5 apps?* A: The best guide to check is CanIUse.com. It lists the capabilities of the mobile browsers along side the desktop browsers. YMMV when it comes to mobile browsers.   *Q: What is HTML5...more »

I love teaching Groovy to existing Java developers, because they have such a hard time holding back Tears Of Joy when they see how much easier life can be. Today, though, I did a quick demo that resulted in a line of Groovy that was so amusing I had to post it here. Consider a trivial POGO (Plain Old Groovy Object) called Course: class Course String name int days String toString() { "($name,$days)" } } The goal was to take a collection of courses and...more »

I gave a talk at NEJUG tonight on the new features in Grails 2.0, with some coverage of the new features in Groovy 1.8 and a live coding demo of the “Twitter in 40 minutes” application. Many thanks to the organizers for the invitation, Constant Contact for hosting, and to the attendees for the great questions and enthusiasm. You can download the talk slides here and the completed demo application here. To see the earlier recorded talks that I based mine on check out Peter...more »

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This week I'm answering questions about HTML5 and Game Programming in general over at CodeRanch. Here are a couple of the questions I answered today. Questions may have been tweaked for brevity.   *Q: What I use for animation, setTimeout or requestAnimationFrame?* A: Use requestAnimationFrame. Check out Paul Irish 's requestAnimationFrame shim for an easy way to address all the variants and fall back to setTimeout.   *Q: What could I use to recreate Legend of...more »

Sam Brannen will be presenting “Spring 3.1 to 3.2 in a Nutshell” at the Scandinavian Developer Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden on Tuesday, April 17, 2012. SDC2012 is about bringing together people who work with software development to discuss new ideas, views on industry trends, and exchange experiences. Topics covered include the latest tools and frameworks for both the Java and .Net platforms, as well as plenty about development for the Web, IBMi, and Mobile devices. For...more »

Sam Brannen will be presenting “Spring 3.1 to 3.2 in a Nutshell” at the third annual Spring I/O conference in Madrid, Spain on February 16, 2012. Spring I/O 2012 will be a 2-day event full of presentations delivered by development leads, book authors and professionals on Spring, Groovy/Grails and Cloud technologies. The perfect place to obtain critical skills to help you build, run and manage tomorrow’s software solutions. Don’t miss the chance to meet and learn from...more »

In promotion of my book Learning HTML5 Game Programming, I'll be answering questions about my book and gaming in general all this week on the HTML5, CSS, and JS forum at CodeRanch. Four random posters at CodeRanch will be awarded a free copy of my book.     They won't eligible for the drawing but feel free to ask questions on this thread or on Google+ as well.    more »