Overview
Griffon 0.9.2-beta-3 – "Aquila adalberti" - is a maintenance release of Griffon 0.9.
Griffon Team
We would like to welcome two new team members to the core development team:
- René Gröschke ( @breskeby)
- Alexander Klein ( @saschaklein)
New Features
Buildtime
IDE Integration
The integration files for Eclipse and IDEA have been updated to conform to their latest conventions.
Dependencies
Plugin dependencies declared using the Dependency DSL should
be fully honored now.
The DependencyReport script will now skip configurations
that may not available (i.e, such as
provided)
Plugin CLI sources
Plugins can now build and package sources that should be
excluded form runtime. Just place the sources under
src/cli and the build will do the rest. Adding the
package classes to the build via the dependency DSL is as easy as
pasting the following snippet in the plugin's
_Events.groovy script
Substitute 'quartz' for your plugin name. This feature is available to plugins that also package an addon descriptor.
Runtime
WindowManager DSL
Starting with Griffon 0.9.2 there's a new DSL for configuring
show/hide behavior per window. This configuration can be set in
griffon-app/conf/Config.groovy, and here is how it
looks
The name of each entry must match the value of the Window's name: property. Each entry may have the following options
- show - used to show the window to the screen. It must be a closure that takes two parameters: the window to display and the current application.
- hide - used to hide the window from the screen. It must be a closure that takes two parameters: the window to hide and the current application.
- handler - a custom WindowDisplayHandler.
The first two options have priority over the third one. If one is missing then the WindowManager will invoke the default behavior. There is one last option that can be used to override the default behavior provided to all windows
Previous to Griffon 0.9.2 the first window to be displayed during the Ready phase was determined by a simple algorithm: picking the first available window from the managed windows list. With 0.9.2 however, it's now possible to configure this behavior by means of the WindowManager DSL. Simply specify a value for swing.windowManager.startingWindow, like this
This configuration flag accepts two types of values:
- a String that defines the name of the Window. You must make sure the Window has a matching name property.
- a Number that defines the index of the Window in the list of managed windows.
If no match is found then the default behavior will be executed.
Conditional logging
The latest Groovy beta release (1.8b3) includes a new AST transformation (@Log) that can inject a Logger instance (if not present already) and transforms all logging calls to be conditionally guarded. This means that a simple logging statement as
is transformed into
While Griffon 0.9.2-beta-3 still depends on Groovy 1.7.5 (which doesn't provide access to @Log) it however, does inject conditional logging on all logger instances belonging to Griffon artifacts, that is: controllers, models, views, services, and any additional artifacts added by plugins.
Breaking Changes
Moved Classes
- griffon.core.BaseGriffonApplication -> org.codehaus.griffon.runtime.core.BaseGriffonApplication
Changed Classes
- griffon.core.ArtifactManager turned into an interface
- griffon.core.ArtifactManager.getClassesOfType() returns List<GriffonClass> rather than GriffonClass[]
- griffon.core.ArtifactManager.getAllClasses() returns List<GriffonClass> rather than GriffonClass[]
- ArtifactManager is no longer a singleton. You can get a hold to the current ArtifactManager instance by querying the application directly. ApplicationHolder can be used for all other classes that do not have a direct reference to the running application. The rationale for this change is to have as few magic singleton classes as possible.
New classes
- org.codehaus.griffon.runtime.core.AbstractArtifactManager
- org.codehaus.griffon.runtime.core.DefaultArtifactManager
Dependency Management
Plugins built with Griffon 0.9.2 and upwards should declare
all of its dependencies using the Dependency DSL found in
griffon-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy, including those
that are located in the
lib directory. For the latter case, you must declare
a resolver that is local to the plugin, like this
Sample Applications
Griffon 0.9.2-beta-3 ships with 5 sample applications of varying levels of complexity demonstrating various parts of the framework. In order of complexity they are:
File Viewer
File Viewer is a simple demonstration of creating new MVCGroups on the fly.
Source: samples/FileViewer
To run the sample from source, change into the source
directory and run
griffon run-app from the command prompt.
GroovyEdit
GroovyEdit is an improved version of FileViewer that uses custom observable models.
Source: samples/GroovyEdit
To run the sample from source, change into the source
directory and run
griffon run-app from the command prompt.
Font Picker
Font Picker demonstrates form based data binding to adjust the sample rendering of system fonts.
Source: samples/FontPicker
To run the sample from source, change into the source
directory and run
griffon run-app from the command prompt.
Greet
Greet, a full featured Griffon Application, is a Twitter client. It shows Joint Java/Groovy compilation, richer MVCGroup interactions, and network service based data delivery.
Source: samples/Greet
To run the sample from source, change into the source
directory and run
griffon run-webstart from the command prompt.
Because Greet uses JNLP APIs for browser integration using
run-app will prevent web links from working.


