puts Blog.new(”nonsense”)

InfoQ recently posted the video of my presentation on Grails from QCon San Francisco. If 50 slides in 50 minutes sounds a tad formulaic and tired to you, then you’re in luck. Instead, you’ll see 50 slides in about 5 minutes, followed immediately by 50 minutes of no-nonsense live coding goodness.

In what could perhaps be described as a series of 12 back-to-back lightning talks, you can see what it takes to go from a blank slate to a deployable Grails app including…

• defining domain classes,
• setting up relationships,
• hooking up a database,
• establishing constraints and validation error messages,
• enjoying sexy dynamic finders,
• applying custom URL mappings,
• working with tag libraries,
• encapsulating business logic in services,
• integrating with existing Java code,
• sending e-mail,
• finding and installing plugins, and
• locking down the app with secure authentication and authorization

There’s some good Q & A in there as well. Unfortunately not all of the questions came through on the audio, but in most cases you can pick up the context from the reply.

You’ll also hear me reference Charles Nutter’s JRuby talk a few times over the course of the presentation, and I recommend checking out that video as well.

Andres Almiray interviewed me this week for the Groovy Zone. We cover a breadth of topics, including:

• Just how far Grails has come in the past two years
• Why the GORM DSL likely obviates previous mapping techniques
• Groovy as a gateway drug to more and better developer testing
• Why Grails testing infrastructure improvements deserve top billing in Grails 1.1
• Something called Rails
• New testing-related developments in the Groovy ecosystem

For all that and more, check out the interview at Groovy Zone, a new(ish) and hoppin’ community for Groovy and Grails news.

(Did I mention that we discuss testing?)

Many thanks to Andres and DZone for the interview.

Marcos Fábio Pereira has just published a step-by-step guide for using the slick JasperGrails plugin in the Racetrack application (originally developed in Getting Started with Grails). The tutorial includes examples of generating a PDF of all the races in the app, exporting an Excel spreadsheet listing all the registrations for a race, and the impressively concise bits of code necessary to get this new tastiness up and running.

Nicely done, Marcos!

• More evidence that 100% test coverage is just a good place to start.

• And here I thought perhaps it was finally time to drop BASIC from my resume. ^§

• Dave Klein takes on a gnarly Oracle schema using the Grails ORM DSL. If you’re dying to see some XML or annotations in use, then well, you need help, and this tutorial simply ain’t for you.

• Git repo containing the complete Rails source code and it’s entire revision history: 21.9 MB. SVN checkout of the current Rails source code with no history: 23.8 MB. Convinced yet? ^‡

• Safari 3.1 hits the street, now with more cowbell marginally better dev tools. Oh well, it’s still feels like the best fit for day-to-day browsing, but it’s got a long way to go if it’s ever gonna compete with Firebug for some real web developer love.

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^§Link courtesy of Rob Sanheim.

^‡Link courtesy of Stu Halloway.

Want to know more about just how easy it is to contribute to the many open source projects that you use day in and day out? The Refactotum series is dedicated to showing you how. Coming up at RailsConf in May, Stu, Justin, Rob, and I will be offering up another round of Refactotum open sorcery.

What are people saying about Refactotum? The 2GX crowd was pretty psyched…

Showed how you can contribute to open source even if you don’t have a lot of time.

Cool. Time? What’s that?

Very helpful. I’ll definitely follow up by contributing to open source projects.

Right on.

Explaining how to contribute to open source is something that is not usually covered and needs to be taught and evangelized.

And even when the network didn’t cooperate…

It turned out to be a giant “pair” programming exercise instead of individual programming and this turned out to be MUCH better. Some of the ideas discussed were really intriguing.

Grab your seat now before they’re all gone. Hope to see you there!

In the spirit of Andy Glover’s Weekly Bag and Bill Dupre’s frequent batches of Whatever, herein lies the first installment in a (sure-to-be-sporadic) series of Noteworthy Nonsense.

• iPhone web app authors rejoice! (Yes. You read that right. Web-app authors.) Test your web apps using the official iPhone simulator. (And, oh yeah, you can go native now too…but the lack of RubyCocoa support is a bit of a downer.)

• A plugin that lets you run Struts 1.x code inside a Grails app? Yeah, I cringed too, but this will surely be a welcome migration path for those folks trapped in the land of *.do.

• Are SVN users suffering from the Blub paradox? Linus pulls no punches in offering up his take on this matter.

• Dan Benjamin’s back with the Leopard edition of his definitive “how-to” guide for rolling your own installation of Ruby, Rails, and friends.

• The last time Glen Smith declared a month o’ Grails, he showed the community just how very much is possible with merely an hour a day. Now Glen’s at it again, but this time it’s MockFor(March). If history is any indicator, expect Glen to blaze new trails in the land of Grails unit testing. Glen: It takes GUTs, but I’m rootin’ for you!

• Speaking of good unit tests, Jay Fields announced a new version of the expectations gem, complete with a healthy dose of example code. One expectation per test? Saying “goodbye” to cumbersome test names? Jay’s onto something here.

The first print copies of Scott Davis’s new book, Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java, debuted last week at 2GX.

I had the pleasure of reviewing the book prior to its release, and I’m happy to say that Scott has clearly assembled the go-to guide for turning Groovy into every Java developer’s perfect utility knife. Whether you need to quickly parse an Atom feed, serve up an Excel spreadsheet from your Grails app, or create a tarball on the fly, this book will show you how. In true Groovy style, Scott does away with all unnecessary ceremony and gets right down to business. In almost every section, the very first thing you see is code - the recipe for solving to the problem at hand - and if you want to stick around for the clear and informative explanation, well, that’s strictly optional.

InfoQ recently published a step-by-step tutorial for quickly installing and configuring the Grails Acegi plugin into the Racetrack application (originally developed in Getting Started with Grails). Kudos to Fadi Shami for assembling this handy guide.

You can find out more about the Grails Acegi plugin and the rest of the fast-growing plugin ecosystem at the official Grails plugin site.

The inaugural Groovy/Grails Experience (2GX) is in the bag, and as much as I was looking forward to it, it honestly exceeded my expectations rather significantly. The sheer enthusiasm for Groovy (and Grails) in the Java community is almost palpable.

The event capped off with a new installment of Relevance’s Refactotum series. Jay Zimmerman (Director of 2GX and the popular NFJS Symposium Series) was kind enough to dedicate the final afternoon of the conference to this unique session demonstrating the ease of contributing to open source, followed immediately by a workshop for putting those techniques into practice. Coming out of the Refactotum, we had a widely diverse set of contributions, all of which make meaningful improvements to Grails. The resulting set of patches involve increasing test coverage, refactoring for readability, boarding up broken windows, reducing complexity, and a handful of other improvements as well. And perhaps the most rewarding part (for me, at least) of the three-day conference was talking to the several people that stopped by afterward, each to express that while they had never before understood just how easy it is to get involved in open source, now they know, and each seemed downright eager to contribute!

Special thanks to Scott Davis, Jeff Brown, Dierk König, Alex Tkachman, Alexandru Popescu, Ken Kousen, and Daniel Hinojosa for their excellent and insightful contributions to the discussion!

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Resources

Slides

• Refactotum #6 - Grails (2GX)

Helpful Links and Tools Discussed

• Jay Fields - Tests Reflect Code Quality
• Code Coverage (Wikipedia)
• Grails Code Coverage Report
• Cobertura
• easyb
• Testing Private Methods in Ruby^§

Resulting Patches (Keep ‘em Coming!)

• GRAILS-2412
• GRAILS-2469
• GRAILS-2470
• GRAILS-2471
• GRAILS-2521
• GRAILS-2527

^§The controversy of testing private methods isn’t unique to Groovy…but seems common to Refactotums.

Grails 1.0 is in the wild!

Check out the release notes, download the new hotness, and for Pete’s sake (er, Neal’s sake?), take that old web framework out behind the barn already.