Streamlined 0.9 is now available for download. From the rich and handy quick-add interface to the super-flexible and highly-interactive advanced filtering, this release packs a big punch in terms of quickly empowering your end users with a serious data management interface. In addition to introducing the aforementioned heavy hitters, it also makes standard many common idioms to increase the overall usability of your apps (e.g., auto-labeling for required fields) and offers some optional usability enhancers (mmmm, tasty breadcrumbs) as well.

Of course, those are just some of the many improvements available in Streamlined 0.9. Be sure to check out the release notes for full details, including screen shots and links to additional docs.

As we approach 1.0, Streamlined continues to position itself as the solution for developing an instant, production-ready UI for your ActiveRecord models. So, what are you waiting for? Stop banging rocks together and build something!

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Michael Kimsal for a diverse and enjoyable episode of WebDevRadio. Over the course of about 30 minutes, we tackle such topics as Groovy, Grails, Ruby, Streamlined, and the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour.

If you’ve listened to WebDevRadio in the past, you know that Michael comes primarily from a PHP and Perl background. Throw those languages in the mix with Ruby and Groovy, and that’s a whole lot of dynamic language goodness for 30 minutes of podcasting! (We try not to leave any of the low-level languages too battered and bruised, but their extra baggage has simply become too much to bear for day-to-day application development.)

While the podcast itself is obviously intended to focus on web development, in this particular interview, developer productivity may very well outshine web development as the overriding theme. We discuss the profound impact of convention-over-configuration, the future of opinionated software, and whether there’s ever such a thing as too much choice.

Many thanks to Michael for having me on the podcast.

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Download via iTunes

Download the MP3 directly

Grails 0.6 is in the wild, and watch out…your Grails development is about to get a serious shot in the arm!

Without a doubt, the developer experience was one of the key motivating factors in my original journey to Grails (and away from some Java web frameworks that shall remain nameless). And somewhat unfortunately, while the last few releases have been packed with new features and increased modularity, each release has brought with it slower start-up times, more time needed to run tests, etc. As a framework still on it’s way to 1.0, that’s probably acceptable, and perhaps even expected, as performance optimizations had not yet been a priority. But as someone that greatly values the developer experience, and as someone that regularly stands in front of a room full of developers while waiting for a demo app to start, the speed bumps in 0.6 are a welcome improvement.

And these speed increases are no small enhancement. We’re talking about at least a 50% reduction in start-up times. The next time you run grails run-app or grails shell, you’re bound to think it was preceded by a stealth installation of some crazy new plugin.

grails install-plugin powerthirst (NSFW)

In fact, these speed bumps make experimentation the most viable it’s ever been with Grails. Wanna try something out before adding it to your service class? No problem. Just run grails shell and you’ve got a fully-bootstrapped Grails environment with complete access to all your domain classes, service classes, etc.

And as someone who thinks you can never have too may tests, the fact that your unit and integration tests now run faster is a big boost as well.

Of course, improved developer productivity isn’t the only thing that’s noteworthy in this release. There are several new features to try out as well. Some of the heavy hitters include

• Joint Groovy/Java compilation
• Improved support for REST with automatic XML/JSON marshaling and RESTful URL mappings
• New configuration DSL for those times when you want to step outside the bounds of convention over configuration

And not only does development itself have a newfound flow to it (thanks to the speed increases discussed above), this release also introduces a DSL for defining web flows and managing conversational state in your application. This DSL greatly simplifies much of the logic traditionally crammed into controllers, and instead expresses the behavior in a much more natural and readable manner. Be sure to check out Graeme’s example to get a feel for what’s possible with this new and rich means for expressing the flow of your web application.

It’s worth having a look at the release notes for full details on the many improvements in this release, complete with code samples and screen shots.

This marks the last big release prior to Grails 1.0, so grab it while it’s hot, and have fun!

Resources

• Read the Grails 0.6 Release Notes
• Download Grails 0.6