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Countdown to Grails 2.0: User experience

Welcome to this final Countdown to Grails 2.0 post: the final release is imminent! I'm not really going to say much here because some of the most interesting new features of Grails 2.0 are much better seen. For that reason, I've created a screencast so you can see exactly what awaits you when you install Read more…

Countdown to Grails 2.0: Persistence

It's been a while since the last Countdown blog post, but the release of 2.0.0.RC3 gives me a good reason to write another. In the last post, I focused on database migration and how we are standardising on the new Database Migration Plugin. I'll be continuing on the theme of persistence here and introducing several Read more…

RabbitMQ: Enabling Grails full text search on Cloud Foundry

In my second blog about Grails and Cloud Foundry I introduced a variant of the Grails Twitter example that could be hosted on CloudFoundry.com At the time I mentioned that full text search using the Searchable plugin would limit you to a single application instance because the search indices would be unique to each instance. Read more…

Using Micro Cloud Foundry from Grails

Back in April, VMware introduced Cloud Foundry to the world and with it came super-simple application deployment for Grails developers. Fast forward several months and now another piece of the jigsaw is in place: Micro Cloud Foundry. You can now have your own Cloud Foundry instance for testing or any other use case. And of Read more…

Countdown to Grails 2.0: Database Migrations

One of the many nice features of Grails is the way it will automatically create your database schema for you from your domain model. Admittedly it's a feature of Hibernate that Grails uses, but still, it helps you get started very quickly with database-driven web applications without having to worry about the database schema. What Read more…

Countdown to Grails 2.0: Static resources

Web applications typically rely heavily on what we call static resources, such as Javascript, CSS and image files. In a Grails application, they are put into a project's web-app directory and then referenced from the HTML. For example, will create a link to the file web-app/css/main.css. All very straightforward. You might even think that the Read more…

Countdown to Grails 2.0: Unit testing

The first milestone of Grails 1.4 (now 2.0) has now been released and we are on the last stages of the journey towards 1.4 2.0 final. As we approach that point, I will be writing a series of blog posts that cover the various new features and changes that the 1.4 2.0 version brings. I'll Read more…

Deeper into Grails & Cloud Foundry

In my previous post, I showed you how easy it is to deploy a Grails application to Cloud Foundry using the corresponding plugin. Hopefully that whetted your appetite and you are ready to look at a more complex Grails application that demonstrates the power of the GORM plugins and stretches the Cloud Foundry services. If Read more…

One-step deployment with Grails and Cloud Foundry

A couple of years back, the co-founder of a startup spoke at the London Groovy and Grails User Group. I remember vividly how he said he dreamed of deploying a Grails application with "just one click". With the announcement of the new Cloud Foundry service, his dream is nearly a reality for all Grails users. Read more…

The future of functional web testing?

The Groovy community is a productive bunch, which means there are a plethora of frameworks, libraries, and tools to make your life easier. The area of testing seems to be particularly fertile ground and I've recently been looking into a couple of tools that, when combined, promise a step change in your productivity when writing Read more…