Groovy
AST Transforms: Building a simple Game Engine DSL for kids
I became a dad last may. Therefore, I am really interested in all the initiatives which aim to teach kids programming. @tonydavids0n and fdearle praised the virtues of Groovy as language to introduce programming concepts thanks to its powerful but concise syntax.
Moreover, this talks targets DSL creation. The creation of you own language (no matter how small it is) is fascinating to me and I guess any developer.
@fdearle is the author of Groovy Domain Specific Languages. When I visited the Packtpub website, the book was at only 5€! So, I bought it. If you visit the book's site and the promotion is no longer running, do not dispare. At the very end of the talk the author shares a 50% off code. Yes, watching the video until the end pays off!
▶ Rethinking API Design with Traits
Traits are one of the best Groovy features. Personally, I had not used them a lot until recently. But the more I use them, the more they help me to write cleaner and more reusable code.
Please watch this talk by @cedricchampeau if you want to understand how Traits work.
Spock
Spock Workshop
I was an attendee at @pledbrook and @marcinerdmann Spock workshop at Groovy Grails eXchange.
The workshop was great and the material is published as a github repo. They have a branch which contains the proposed solutions. They have a lot of interesting exercises. For example, how to test an async method.
Being able to ask live Spock and Geb questions to Marcin is as awesome as it gets.
Grails
Grails 3.1 and the Road Ahead
GGX second day keynote by @graemerocher was a deep dive into application profiles for Grails. On the one hand internal private profiles are great. We currently have four grails 3 apps and surely I will benefit from my own profile. On the other other hand public profiles open the door for really interesting uses.
Moreover, I you watch this keynote you will learn more about Json views. They are AWESOME!
Really enthusiastic about where Grails is headed
Building reactive applications with the Grails 3 event system
Grails 3 Event system is one of the best features in the framework to create reusable and decoupled functionality. We use Events in our Grails 3 app and this talk was highlighted in my GGX personal agenda. @bitboss talk did not disappoint. It is a must watch for anyone using or planning to use Events in a Grails 3 app.
Check out the talk slides
Want to learn more about Events. Back in issue #9 I linked to @goeth's talk Event-Driven plugins with grails 3.
Gradle
Log unit test execution events into console
I personally favor a more verbose output while running unit tests on the command line. @paveldudka show you how to achieve this verbosity. I will probably push this snippet into our Android app's build.gradle tomorrow
I was lucky enough to talk at GGX London 2015 last Monday and Tuesday. Venue location and organisation were excellent. Content and atmosphere were great too. However, the attendance was low. A worrisome sign of Groovy community health? I don't know but at least I can spread the word about the great material which was presented in the conference as you will soon discover.
Groovy Calamari