IDE Support

It's been a while since IDEA added support for Groovy DSL descriptors. Recently Eclipse gained the same capabilities via DSLD ( explained by Andrew Eisenberg, Vladimír Oraný posted a thorough tutorial here). During Gr8conf Copenhagen 2010 a group of Griffon enthusiasts banded together under the Hackergarten space and created a couple of GDSLs specifically tailored for Griffon. This year was no different, a similar group managed to build improved versions of these GDSLs plus the first cur of DSLDs. These scripts should be automatically picked up by either IDE as soon as the Griffon jars are placed in the classpath. So what exactly do you gain now?

• autocompletion of Swing nodes when working in a Griffon View script.
• autocompletion of methods from standard Griffon artifacts.
• autocompletion of methods from the following AST transformations: @Bindable, @Vetoable, @EventPublisher, @MVCAware, @ThreadingAware

Configure Application's Manifest

It's now possible to configure the manifest that's placed inside the application's jar. Griffon will automatically create the following entries in the application's manifest

There might be times when you must specify additional attributes or override existing ones. You can do this by adding a new block of configuration to BuildConfig.groovy, for example

Merge duplicate files when packaging

There's a high chance of some files to have duplicates, e.g. griffon-artifacts.properties if you have installed a plugin that provides MVC groups. It's possible to instruct the build to merge duplicate files by specifying a regular expression and a merging strategy. The following table explains the different merging strategies available

You can specify merging preferences in @BuildConfig.groovy@ like this

This setting will overwrite any XML file found in the path with the last version encountered as jars are processed.

The griffon build defines a set of default mappings, which are the ones found in the next table

Merging preferences must be defined from the most specific to the least. Your preferences will override any default settings.

Configurable Platform Customizations

In the past, platform customizations like the handling of the About and Preferences menu in OSX, were handled internally by the Griffon runtime, giving you no chance to override or alter the default behavior. That has been changed now. Starting with this release you should be able to instruct the runtime how you want those customizations to be applied. You only need to implement the griffon.util.PlatformHandler interface and register your implementation. The following configuration in Config.groovy specifies a different handler for macosx:

Now you only need to create such handler, like this:

The following platform keys are recognized by the application in order to locate a particular handler: linux, macosx, solaris and windows.

New AST Transformations

It's possible for non-artifact classes to participate in the MVC group mechanism (but not he life cycle itself) by implementing the griffon.core.MVCHandler interface. This task is easily achieved by annotating the class with griffon.transform.MVCAware. The same can be said for classes that would like to gain the capabilities of executing code using the threading facilities exposed by Griffon. The interface is griffon.core.ThreadingHandler and the transformation is griffon.transform.ThreadingAware.

0.9.3-beta-2 Release Notes