We’re getting ready to release Grails 2.1, with a release candidate hopefully this week. The cache plugins I mentioned last week will be released around the same time, and the ‘core’ cache plugin will be a default plugin in BuildConfig.groovy. I released an update of the database-migration plugin to address some bugs that were keeping that from being a default plugin, so that will also be included by default in BuildConfig.groovy. I’ve been working on a Grails book to...more »

Last week I hosted a webinar about running Java apps on Heroku that use the Spring Framework and the Neo4j graph database. Here is the recording of that webinar: In the webinar I began by deploying a copy of the Spring MVC + Hibernate template app from heroku.com/java on Heroku. Then I made a few modifications to the app to switch the persistence from Hibernate / JPA to Neo4j. You can get the full source code on GitHub. Here is a quick recap of what I did to switch the template app to...more »

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The details for SpringOne 2GX 2012 are now online, it will be in Washington, DC this year, October 15th-18th. The MongoDB plugin went 1.0 this week. Jeff and I have been working on the cache plugin, which uses the new Spring cache abstraction and isn’t coupled to a particular implementation. The ‘core’ plugin has an in-memory implementation, but you’ll want to use one of the extension plugins for a more robust version. These currently include the Ehcache and Redis...more »

I’ve been doing a lot of introductory Groovy presentations lately, and an issue keeps coming up that I feel I have to address. I’ve had to think hard about how to do this, though, because I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m probably going to fumble it a bit, so please forgive me if I ramble. Lately there have been several episodes in the IT industry of boys behaving badly. A recent article in Mother Jones has a good summary. In short, a few guys in this industry have...more »

I’ve created a Play 2 Tutorial and posted it on GitHub! The tutorial covers how to: Create a Play App Set up an IDE Start the Play Server Routes Test a Route Update a Controller Test a Controller Update a View Test a View Deploy your app on the Cloud with Heroku Create a Model Create UI for Adding Tasks Get Tasks as JSON Display the Tasks via CoffeeScript and jQuery Make the App Pretty with Twitter Bootstrap Add Form Validation Update the App on...more »

Over the next couple weeks I’ll be doing two Java User Group presentations, a Flash Platform User Group presentation and one Webinar. Hope to see you at one of these events: Wednesday May 9 – Denver Java User Group: Running Java, Play! and Scala Apps in the Cloud Thursday May 10 – Webinar hosted by Neo4j: Graphs in the Cloud: Neo4j and Heroku Tuesday May 15 – Atlanta Java User Group: Running Java, Play! and Scala Apps on the Cloud Thursday May 24 –...more »

Twitter is on the face of it such a simple application that it can be built in 40 minutes in Grails. For a consummate software engineer with state of the art tools, building a twitter in clone 40 minutes that can scale... might even be easy today given a proper set of cloud enabled tools. But, even if it is an exact working copy of twitter and can scale to ten times the size of the current twitter... it's NOT twitter and will never...more »

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Has someone moved computing beyond the Finite State Automaton in recent years? I'm unaware of anyone providing a system of computation that is in wide spread use that is not a Finite State Automaton. If someone has please let me know. I've heard of some researchers in Tel Aviv working on a neural net. Considering that all we have to work with, even in the clouds is FSA it seems that we will always be working with conceptual derivatives of the Turing processing tape. So as much as I...more »

Check out this post on using Shiro to secure a Grails application. The Spring Security plugins are much more widely used but Shiro is an excellent security framework and deserves a lot more attention in the Grails community. Not strictly Grails-related, but an interesting read on using WebSockets in Tomcat 7. And not even coding-related, but here are two funny Tumbler sites that should be in your RSS reader: Texts From Dog and one tiny hand. If you want to keep up with these “This...more »

This week I’ll be doing two presentation about Heroku: Tuesday May 1 – 5:30 PM at the Denver Open Source Users Group:Heroku Cloud Computing Platform Thursday May 3 – 12:25pm at Future Insights Live (Las Vegas):Client/Server Apps with HTML5 and Java Hope to see you there!more »

Last week I announced the WebJars project that allows you to specify your web libraries (JavaScript, CSS, etc) as dependencies in your Java web applications. With some help from Jeremy Grelle I was able to get a simple WebJars Spring MVC example working. First you will need to add the WebJars repository to your build. For Maven, just add the following to your “pom.xml” build file: <repositories> <repository> ...more »

Update: I’ve created a Spring MVC WebJars example. Our web apps are using more and more web libraries like jQuery, Backbone.js and Twitter Bootstrap. The traditional way to use those libraries is to locate & download the JavaScript and CSS source then just copy it into a project. To me this resembles how we used to just copy JAR files into a project’s WEB-INF/lib dir. But why not do with web libraries like we now do with Java libraries and specify them as managed...more »

This week I will be presenting about Running Java, Scala, and Play apps on Heroku at the Houston JUG and at No Fluff Just Stuff in Reston, VA: Houston JUG – Wednesday April 25 at 6:30pmRunning Java and Play! Apps on the Cloud NFJS – Reston, VA – Saturday April 28 at 3:15pmRunning Java and Scala Apps on Heroku Hope to see you there!more »

The slides for the presentation “Spring 3.1 and MVC Testing Support” by Sam Brannen from the 4Developers conference in Poznan, Poland are now available below and on SlideShare. Please note that this presentation is an abridged and slightly modified version of the one given by Sam Brannen and Rossen Stoyanchev at SpringOne 2GX 2012. To view the unabridged version of the presentation in its original glory, see the ShowOff presentation on Github here. To view the source for the...more »

The updated slides for the presentation “Effective out-of-container Integration Testing” by Sam Brannen from the 4Developers conference in Poznan, Poland are now available on SlideShare. more »

The updated slides for the presentation “Spring 3.1 to 3.2 in a Nutshell” by Sam Brannen from SDC 2012 in Gothenburg, Sweden are now available on SlideShare. more »

The April edition of the Java Tech Journal is all about Groovy; check out the table of contents: Making JavaFX Groovier – Easy Development of JavaFx 2.x Applications, Dean Iverson Contracts for Groovy – GContracts: A Design by Contract Extension for Groovy, Andre Steingress Grails: Beyond the Quickstart – Is Grails Suitable for the Java Enterprise? You Bet!, Peter Ledbrook Griffon: Desktop Development – The Fun Way – Building Desktop Applications with Groovy,...more »