News from April, 2008

This week takes place the 2008 JAX conference, in Germany. Last year, Groovy won the first prize of the JAX innovation award, and this year, Grails was submitted and has just been nominated by the jury. Guillaume Laforge, Groovy project lead and initiator of the Grails project, will be at JAX this week and will represent the Grails team and project.

From the nomination announcement:

Now it is official: The ten nominees for the JAX Innovation Award. The winners of the award are kept top secret and will be made public next week at the JAX. The award, which is endowed with price money of 20,000 Euro altogether, originated from an initiative of the Software & Support publishing company.

Among many submissions from all over Europe our jury has selected these ten contributions. The contribution's innovative value, creativity, elegance and relevancy for practice have been the assessment criteria of the jury.

• Apache Sling
• Biometric Authentification
• GIANTsuite AdCreator
• Grails
• GreenFire
• Intrexx Xtreme 4
• Java business transaction performance management across the entire application lifecycle
• jBPM
• PETA
• Visual Rules Business Rules Management System

It is the intention of the JAX Innovation Award to place inspiring innovations from Europe in the limelight and thus help them to get their chance of success. All interested people can enter this contest. Contributions could be submitted by companies but also by individual people, from research and education or from other organizations that contribute to Java, Eclipse or SOA with their project.

"What, Another one?" you say. Well I personally don't like Acegi and other Java based auth libraries I've seen because they are overcomplicated and not very Grailsy. This plugin can virtually install and go - it also has a development-mode only "signup" controller so you can easily create accounts for testing.

This plugin has no API classes to extend or interfaces to implement, it uses Groovy's dynamic nature and a simple events mechanism so that you can alter behaviour by providing your own event handlers, or replacing the entire event handler class.

It also leverages Groovy's dynamic abilities so that you don't have to use the default GORM domain class for user data, in fact you don't need to use GORM at all, it is completely abstracted with minimal requirements on your class (just support 3 properties - login, email and password).

Documentation for Authentication Plugin is online. It can be installed with "grails install-plugin authentication"

The eagerly anticipated 0.2 release of the JSecurity plugin has finally arrived! Release notes are available here, but to whet your appetite here are a few highlights:

• Secure your pages using a simple but powerful DSL in filters.
• Controllers are no longer forced to extend a particular class!
• Built-in "remember me" support - works straight out of the box.
• LDAP authentication support included.
• Leverage existing JSecurity realms.

Have fun!