ThirstyHead.com is now running on Grails 1.2.1

You might notice a few cosmetic changes in ThirstyHead.com -- some new books here, some Twitter and Facebook links there.

But the biggest change took place behind the scenes -- we upgraded the site to Grails 1.2.1. We're happy to report that the upgrade was relatively painless. The only significant code change involved replacing the deprecated <g:createLinkTo> with <g:resource>. After a global search and replace, the website was ready to roll on the latest and greatest version of Grails.

If you haven't upgraded your Grails application yet, what are you waiting for? Type it with me: grails upgrade.

Free Webinar: Getting Started with Groovy, Grails, and MySQL (February 18, 2010)

On February 18, 2010, join Scott Davis on a Sun/Oracle sponsored webinar: Getting Started with Groovy, Grails, and MySQL. We'll spend some time working with MySQL from Groovy 1.7 scripts (Sql.eachRow(), Sql.withBatch()). Then we'll switch gears and show you how easy it is to skin a MySQL database with Grails 1.2. Hope to see you there!

Getting Started with Grails (2nd Edition)

I'm happy to announce the publication of Getting Started with Grails (2nd Edition) -- a comprehensive (and free!) book on learning the Grails web framework, step-by-step.

Jason Rudolph did an outstanding job writing the first edition of this book. I'm thrilled that he gave me the chance to update it to Grails 1.2.

Enjoy!

Java development 2.0 Easy EC2 (and Grails)

Fellow ThirstyHeader Andy Glover has another article out in his Java Development 2.0 series. This one is Easy EC2: Quickly create a CRUD Web application and run it on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Of course, the "quickly" part of the article is courtesy of Grails. Here is the abstract:

Provisioning an EC2 instance for hosting a Java™ Web application is a snap. In this Java development 2.0 column, you'll quickly build a Web application that leverages Groovy, Spring, and Hibernate (via the Grails framework) and deploy it on an EC2 instance.

ThirstyHead at the Groovy Grails Experience in New Orleans

Andy Glover and Scott Davis are constantly criss-crossing the globe, speaking about Groovy, Grails, and easyb at companies and conferences. So it is rare to see them both in the same place. Not surprisingly, that place is The Groovy/Grails Experience, this week in New Orleans.

Andy is talking about easyb and RESTful web services with Grails. Scott is talking about testing with Groovy, Flex clients for Grails applications, and RESTful web services with Grails. (There must be something interesting about that whole REST + Grails situation, eh?)

Mastering Grails: Mock testing with Grails

In this Mastering Grails installment, Scott Davis shows you how to take advantage of the built-in mocking capabilities of the GrailsUnitTestCase and ControllerUnitTestCase classes included with Grails.

Mastering Grails: Creating a custom plug-in

In this Mastering Grails installment, Scott Davis shows you how to create your own Grails plug-in. Once you see how effortless it is to create a plug-in, you'll understand why more than 250 Grails plug-ins are available now, with new ones being added all the time.

Read the article here.

Interview with Ken Sipe creator of Grails JMX plugin

I was lucky enough to catch up with Ken Sipe recently. Ken is the creator of the Grails JMX plugin and a JavaOne Rockstar. We talked about Spring integration with Grails, JMX, and much more. Watch the full interview here.

Beauty in Code appears in the September issue of PragPub Magazine

If you haven't been reading PragPub Magazine, it's a new offering from the sharp folks over at the Pragmatic Bookshelf. PragPub is a free download, available in PDF, epub, and mobi formats. (The mobi format makes the magazine Kindlicious...) Once a month, it's a nice breath of fresh air with more than a hint of that "New Geek" smell.

My article, "Beauty in Code", is featured in the September 2009 issue, along side the likes of Kent Beck, Chad Fowler, Dave Thomas, and more. I sing Beatles and Bob Dylan songs in Groovy. Seriously. Check it out when you get the chance.

Interview with Stuart Halloway, author of Programming Closure and Java.next

I recently caught up with Stuart Halloway, author of "Programming Clojure" and the "Java.next" article series. We talked about how evaluating Groovy, JRuby, Scala, and Clojure eventually lead him to write a book on Clojure. Watch the full interview here.