Blogging Techstacks

Gaelyk 1.1 Released

Earlier today, Guillaume Laforge announced that Gaelyk 1.1 was out. Below are highlights of this version, (which was copied from the release announcement):

• Upgraded to Groovy 1.8.4 and App Engine SDK 1.6.0
• The new get() methods on the datastore service now also work with the asynchronous datastore.
• Added an unindexed property on entities to set unindexed properties: person.unindexed.bio = "..."
• Three annotations to customize the bean / entity coercion (@Key, @Unindexed and @Ignore)
• Part of the work with the async datastore get(), whenever you have a Future to deal with, for example when the async datastore returns a Future, you can call any property on the Future object, and it will proxy those property access to the underlying object returned by the get() call on the future.
• In addition to datastore.query{} and datastore.execute{}, there is now a datastore.iterate{} method that returns an Iterator instead of a list, which is friendlier when your queries return a large number of results.
• Added the prospective search service to the binding
• You can access the asynchronous Memcache service with memcache.async
• Additional convenience methods for the file service
• Added an each and collect method on blobstore to iterate over all the blobs from the blobstore, or to collect some values from all blob infos stored.

The Gaelyk project website has the latest binaries and documentation. Congratulations to the project team on the release!

Gaelyk 1.0 Released

Guillaume Laforge announced the release of Gaelyk 1.0 a short while ago.  Head on over to the Gaelyk site for more information or grab the binaries from the download page.  The changelog in the release announcement lists the following changes:

GAE SDK updated to 1.5.2 and Groovy to 1.8.1 Introduction of a Query DSL for creating SQL-like queries against the datastore Updated template project with a Gradle build, the usage of Gradle GAE / Gaelyk plugins, and the support of Spock for testing Groovlets Introduction of the plugins page in the Gaelyk website, for referencing known plugins By annotating classes with GaelykBindings, the same services and variables are injected in your classes as properties, as the ones which are injected in Groovlets and templates The validation closures of the routes in your URL mapping have access to the request, so you can validate a URL depending on what's in your request (attribute, session, etc.) Added a DSLD file (DSL descriptor) for Eclipse for easing code-completion and navigation Added a get() method on Key, as well as on lists of keys Ability to convert lists to Keys Added two encoded string and key conversion utilities Additional datastore.get() methods to retrieve entities by their keys more concisely Problems with the recent XMPP support fixed Fixed inability to access the various services and variables from within binding/before/after blocks in plugin descriptors

Groovy News: Gaelyk 0.6 Released

Wow!  This is a pretty big release!  The following describes the changes, additions, and fixes in this release and was copied/pasted directly from the gaelyk announcement thread on Google Groups:

• Updated to GAE SDK 1.4.0 and Groovy 1.7.6
• Channel service added in the binding and added a convenient method for sending messages
• Ability to specify the "warmup request" handler through a route definition
• Added app.gaelyk.version in the binding
• Use a servlet context listener for initializing the plugin system
• Initial support for the asynchronous datastore
• Updated the task queue enhancements to use the new package (as task queues migrated from labs)
• Introduced a Gradle build script for building Gaelyk itself
• Increased the code coverage of the project to over 82%
• Added before{} request and after{} request lifecycle hooks to plugins
• Added initial Eclipse project files in the template project
• Fixed a bug with ignore URL routes which triggered NPEs after the capabilities routing was added
• Corrected typos in the tutorials

Be careful, however, as there are two breaking changes compared to previous versions:

• Compared to the previous version of the toolkit, the handling of incoming emails and incoming jabber messages has changed. The GaelykIncomingEmailServlet and GaelykXmppServlet are gone. It is no longer required to have dedicated servlets for those two purposes, instead you must use the URL routing system to indicate the handlers that will take care of the incoming messages. If you were relying on those two servlets, please make sure to upgrade, and read the updated tutorial on URL routing and incoming email and jabber messages.
• The initialization of the plugin system is not done anymore by the Groovlet and template servlet, but is done by a servlet context listener. So you'll have to update your web.xml file to specify that listener. Please have a look at the template project or the documentation on how to setup the new context listener.

You will also notice that the Gaelyk website has been updated:

• You will find some "quick links" to go more directly to the information that matters.
• On the front page, a list of a few live Gaelyk websites in the wild is displayed
• A "search" section has been implemented, using Google's custom search engine, which will let you search through the Gaelyk website, the GitHub content, as well as the Gaelyk Google Group messages
• You now have a single-page documentation option for those who wish to print the documentation (please think about the trees before printing)
• And a PDF of the whole documentation is available, which is handy for offline browsing:
  http://gaelyk.appspot.com/gaelyk.pdf

Download Gaelyk 0.6 binaries and project files from the project web site.