Grails 1.1.1, Gr8conf, AppEngine and other happenings
Posted by:
Graeme Rocher
on 2009-05-21 07:06:12.0
Just got back from Gr8conf and really had a blast. It was a nice small group of 90-100 which meant you could really have a lot of one on one time with many of the attendees who had questions. The sessions were also not too short. Having that extra bit of time to elaborate on things makes a real different compared to the 45 minute rush you have at JavaOne et al.
All in all it felt more like a No Fluff event, which can only be described as a good thing. Right before the conference we released Grails 1.1.1 which is mainly a bug fix release, but the exciting part is the new Google AppEngine plugin which works with Grails 1.1.1
The plugin takes the heavy lifting out of configuring a Grails application for usage on AppEngine by automatically configuring the AppEngine development environment and a JDO persistence layer (JPA is coming too soon). You get reloading out of the box too, so Grails + AppEngine is really the most productive environment for developing JVM applications for AppEngine.
One missing feature from the AppEngine support right now is GORM (you have to use the raw JDO APIs). However, we are hard at work developing GORM-JPA (and potentially GORM-JDO) which will bring most of the features of GORM on top of standard JPA.
GORM-JPA is not the only exciting thing happening right now in the Grails plugin front. We are working with Adobe on integrating Flex and BlazeDS closely with Spring. The results of that can be seen in the recent Spring/BlazeDS integration 1.0 Rc2 release. The next phase is to build on top of that for the Grails plugin which is on my todo list to complete soon. Exciting times.
The plugin community itself continues to flourish, checkout these:
All in all it felt more like a No Fluff event, which can only be described as a good thing. Right before the conference we released Grails 1.1.1 which is mainly a bug fix release, but the exciting part is the new Google AppEngine plugin which works with Grails 1.1.1
The plugin takes the heavy lifting out of configuring a Grails application for usage on AppEngine by automatically configuring the AppEngine development environment and a JDO persistence layer (JPA is coming too soon). You get reloading out of the box too, so Grails + AppEngine is really the most productive environment for developing JVM applications for AppEngine.
One missing feature from the AppEngine support right now is GORM (you have to use the raw JDO APIs). However, we are hard at work developing GORM-JPA (and potentially GORM-JDO) which will bring most of the features of GORM on top of standard JPA.
GORM-JPA is not the only exciting thing happening right now in the Grails plugin front. We are working with Adobe on integrating Flex and BlazeDS closely with Spring. The results of that can be seen in the recent Spring/BlazeDS integration 1.0 Rc2 release. The next phase is to build on top of that for the Grails plugin which is on my todo list to complete soon. Exciting times.
The plugin community itself continues to flourish, checkout these:
- It is now finally possible to write Grails applications for different Portals such as Liferay and Pluto thanks to the Portlets plugins.
- There is an excellent new plugin that embeds an LDAP server into Grails for easily testing LDAP
- The Flex Scaffold plugin let's you generated complete CRUD applications using Grails and Adobe Flex
- The Build Test Data plugin let's you quickly create dummy test data
- Using the Spring WS plugin writing SOAP web services, feels more like writing REST service. Easy and painless.
Graeme Rocher's complete blog can be found at: http://graemerocher.blogspot.com
About Graeme Rocher
As Head of Grails Development for SpringSource, Graeme Rocher is the project lead and co-founder of the Grails web application framework. He's a member of the JSR-241 Expert Group which standardizes the Groovy language. Graeme authored the Definitive Guide to Grails for Apress and is a frequent speaker at JavaOne, JavaPolis, NoFluffJustStuff, JAOO, the Sun TechDays and more. Graeme joined SpringSource in late 2008 upon the acquisition of G2One Inc. Before founding G2One, Graeme was the CTO of SkillsMatter, a skills transfer company specializing in open source technology and agile software development, where Graeme was in charge of the company's courseware development strategy and general technical direction.
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