The recently released STS 2.3.3 M2 introduced a series of enhancements to our Grails support for Eclipse. In this article I'll be discussing what you can expect to find if you try it out (grab it here: SpringSource Tool Suite).

Groovy-Eclipse

The grails tools actually build on and extend the Groovy-Eclipse support, which is developed by the same team at SpringSource. Earlier this year the Groovy-Eclipse tools won 'Best Open Source Developer Productivity Tool' at Eclipse-Con 2010. You can read more about the latest enhancements in the recent Groovy-Eclipse 2.0.2 release here: New and Noteworthy. I'm not going to focus on Groovy-Eclipse here, but some highlights from that release were:

• refactoring support: now supporting extract method, extract constant, extract local variable
• improvements in code formatting and indentation

Now, onto Grails!

Getting a new perspective

There is now a new Grails perspective to better organize the views and widgets we have been adding to STS. You can open the perspective in the normal way (Window>OpenPerspective>Grails). In the new perspective the first thing to notice is that the Eclipse project explorer is open, rather than the package explorer. The project explorer is using a custom content provider that shows a view of a grails project that should be more familiar to a grails developer: New labels and icons are in place for the groups of similar entities: domain objects, controllers, views, etc. However the biggest change is the new plugins folder. Previously when working with a grails project the plugin dependencies were tricky to see in the UI, being hidden in the classpath container and via some Eclipse linked source folder entries. Now in the project explorer it is much more obvious what the application dependencies are.

Also, related to plugins, we have a new Grails Plugin Project wizard. This is very similar to the Grails Project Wizard, but instead of running create-app, it will cause the create-plugin command to run. With this new wizard and the new support we have for local (inplace) plugins, it is much easier to develop your application following a plugin oriented architecture…

I'm pleased to announce we've just released Spring Roo 1.1.0.M2 (download here). We've also concurrently released SpringSource Tool Suite 2.3.3.M2, which offers the latest integration with this new Spring Roo release. For production use we recommend you continue to use Spring Roo 1.0.2, although we know a very large number of people are happily using the Roo 1.1.0 development releases as well.

What's New?

So, what's included in the new Spring Roo 1.1.0 Milestone 2? Well, there's 140 fixes, improvements and enhancements since Milestone 1. Some of the highlights include:

• Performance has improved by a factor of three since Milestone 1
• Upgrades to Spring Framework 3.0.3, GWT 2.1.0.M2, AspectJ 1.6.10.M1, OpenJPA 2.0.0, Log4J 1.2.16 etc
• Better GWT support, such as eliminating the GWT 2.1 "bikeshed" JAR
• Greatly improved Windows startup scripts
• Improved shell usability, such as case insensitive option matching
• A new "web mvc view" command to simplify creation of MVC views
• Support for user-definable web locales via the "web mvc install language" command
• Extra data on demand capabilities
• Google App Engine integration test support
• Commands to help you easily create simple, advanced and internationalization add-ons
• Numerous add-on infrastructure improvements (see below)

More Add-On Discovery and Management Features

Spring Roo 1.1.0.M2 also features…

Recently we released the first milestone of the Flex Addon for Spring Roo as a part of the Spring BlazeDS Integration 1.5.0.M1 distribution. This addon aims to bring the productivity and usability benefits of Spring Roo to the development of Spring-based RIAs with Flex. The below 15 minute screencast (split into two parts) serves as a quick introduction to the addon and its capabilities. Watch as we go from installation of the addon to a fully functional Flex application backed by Spring in just a handful of commands.

Part 1 walks through the initial download and installation of the addon, as well as initial setup of a Spring Flex project using the Spring Roo integration in SpringSource Tool Suite.

Part 2 demonstrates use of the "flex remoting" commands to generate and update Flex UI scaffolding backed by Spring and Hibernate.

Virgo 2.1.0.M02-incubator is available for download. Apart from completing the "getting started guide", this milestone dramatically reduces startup time - by as much as 5x on some systems.

This should be a further incentive for users of dm Server to migrate to Virgo: Virgo is the codebase for future development, has more liberal licensing, and now provides much faster startup.

Measurements

We measured elapsed time for a warm startup (i.e. without -clean) of the Virgo web server and compared milestone M02 to M01.

On a quad-core Intel Xeon 2.66 GHz machine, startup reduced from 68 to 12 seconds, an…

In part 1 of this series, I introduced you to some of the subtleties associated with persisting domain instances with GORM. This time, I'm going to tackle relationships with particular focus on hasMany and belongsTo.

GORM provides only a few basic elements for defining relationships between domain classes, but they are sufficient to describe most needs. When I give training courses on Grails, it always surprises me how few slides cover relationships. As you can imagine, this apparent simplicity does hide some subtle behaviour that can trip up the unwary. Let's start with the most basic of…

Last week the Eclipse Foundation released the much anticipated next version of Eclipse. You can download Eclipse 3.6 aka Helios from SpringSource's member distribution page. Also check out the New & Noteworthy for this release.

The Tools Team at SpringSource has been busy updating our developer tools to support Eclipse 3.6 and while we haven't released a new version of SpringSource Tool Suite that builds on and bundles 3.6 yet, users can now install STS on top of Eclipse 3.6.

Detailed steps to install STS from our nightly update sites can be found in the installation instructions. Please…

Hot on the heels of the STS on Eclipse 3.6 and Gemini Web milestone announcements, I am glad to report that the first milestone of Gemini Blueprint is available for download. Part of the Gemini project, Blueprint builds on top of the Spring Dynamic Modules v2 code base and is the Reference Implementation for the OSGi 4.2 Blueprint specification. Besides the changes reflecting the transition to the Eclipse Foundation, 1.0.0.M1 code base has been upgraded to the latest Spring framework release. Gemini Blueprint is dual licensed under Apache License and Eclipse Public License.

While the migration of existing Spring DM applications to Gemini Blueprint should be straight forward, a guide…

The first milestone (1.1.0.M01) of Eclipse Gemini Web is now available for download, dual-licensed under the Eclipse Public License and the Apache License 2.0.

SpringSource developed the Reference Implementation of the OSGi Web Container and then contributed the code to Eclipse as the Web sub-project of Gemini. The goal of Gemini is to provide modular implementations of Java EE technology. Gemini Web provides servlet and JSP technology.

Gemini Web runs on the Equinox OSGi framework and embeds Tomcat. It is also integrated into the Eclipse Virgo web server.

For more information see the documentation and the wiki…

Are you new to Grails? Or have you perhaps run into your first GORM "oddity"? If so, then you'll want to read this series on GORM gotchas. Not only will the articles highlight those little idiosyncrasies that often catch people out, but they will also explain why GORM behaves in these ways.

Hopefully you will already know that GORM is the database access library that comes with Grails. It's based on probably the most popular Java ORM out there: Hibernate. As you can imagine, Hibernate is a powerful and flexible library and it brings big benefits to GORM. But there is a cost to using it: many…