New and Noteworthy in groovyblogs 1.2

An article by Glen    2 Comments

Well it’s finally happened! I’ve ported groovyblogs over to Grails 1.2 M2 – and it’s been a fantastic experience. The new Grails milestone has been totally awesome – I haven’t had to do any restarts during development! That has been sensational.

Firstly, and *very* importantly, I’ve been working with Matthew Porter’s team at Contegix to move groovyblogs over to the Contegix Zeus Cloud offering. All I can say is Wow! I never wait for than 5 minutes before I get a return email from someone on their team.

Previously groovyblogs has been running on an iMac in my office with 2Gb of RAM (along with a host of other Grails apps – including this blog). It worked great, but the machine would get swap-starved under load – since the move to Contegix, everything has been totally rock solid – I’m sure everyone will enjoy the increased uptime!

Now… On to the “New and Noteworthy” stuff… groovyblogs is now on twitter! It’s a little experimental and suffers from missing the odd post at the moment, but very usable. Just follow @groovyblogs to get the updates:

And if the iphone is your thing, you might want to checkout the new iphone view which should be lots faster and more bandwidth-friendly than the main page:

The most requested feature for groovyblogs was the ability to see an “English only” view. Well, it’s out there now! Check out the new prefs page on the right hand gutter:

The preference is handled by a client-side cookie – so it should live on for next time you come back. And while we’re spending time in the right gutter, I’ve ripped out the custom security stuff, and replaced it with a JSecurity backend. Not only does that mean a bunch less code to maintain, it also means that “Remember me” is now supported!

And since I was on a plugin binge, it seemed right to rip out the tons of custom search code I had written and replace it with the awesome searchable plugin.

Finally, as I blogged recently the language detection and translation functionality has been rewritten to use Google APIs.

I’ve also migrated all the thumbnail captures over to use the WebThumbs service which means I can retire my old SWT image capture stuff which relied on having console access. Also means I don’t need to rely on JMS for the thumbnail gear (which inturn means that Glassfish v3 prelude could be an option for me now!).

Anyways, it’s out in the wild to enjoy and tagged on google code as release_1.2.

Phew! That’s quite a lot of updates! Plenty of more fun stuff in the pipeline too! Gotta run, the next episode of the grails podcast awaits!