RSS Feeds plugin for Grails released

I’ve finally managed to release the Grails Feeds Plugin I mentioned in my Grails Exchange 2007 talk.

What this plugin does is make it trivial for you to generate syndication feeds (RSS or Atom or any ROME supported format) from within your grails apps.

It supplies a FeedBuilder which uses a simple but flexible DSL for generating a feed data structure, and adds support to the controllers’ render() method to automatically take a feed DSL as input.

Check out the docs and install it into your app today (well as soon as plugins.grails.org DNS for SVN works again).

Docs are here.

Update: DNS issues resolved. You can install the plugin into your grails 1.0 application using: "grails install-plugin feeds"

Tricia Anderson, midwife and friend

Today has been very difficult. We said goodbye to Tricia Anderson at her funeral at a lovely woodland burial ground. It was an incredibly moving occasion for all those present, I doubt that I will ever be at the funeral of a more loved and globally-respected person.

Tricia was an independent midwife of international renown, and we were lucky enough to have her as our midwife for the birth of Amy our first born. We had a wonderful natural birth in a birthpool in the sitting room of our small Victorian terraced house, opposite the railway station with traffic humming past, although it was a Sunday morning so we didn’t notice. She was so incredibly warm and comforting, we could not help but trust her completely. She was so humble that at the time we had no idea how important she was to the midwifery community in the UK and internationally, let alone an accomplished singer, poet, artist and public speaker and campaigner.

She was someone who made a real difference to the world, and quietly but tirelessly worked to improve the lot of women, babies and families worldwide. When we met her we began to realise the tragedy of the loss of birthing and breastfeeding knowledge from all our families since the increasing medicalization of birth in the last few decades. Some people now are two or even three generations away from a true natural birth in the family, so how can we expect new families to see that there is so much wrong with birth as it is experienced now? There are so many aspects of modern hospitalized birth that defeat the natural physiological processes of birth, resulting in increased interventions. This excellent Tricia quote sums it up:

Let us bring them into harsh rooms with bright lights. Let us make them lie on their backs on hard narrow beds. Let us tether them to machines so they cannot move. Let us make them stay silent and make no noise with their pain. Let us expose their most private parts and threaten them with cold steel. Let us make them push their babies upwards, against the pull of the earth…In these conditions, labour swiftly becomes unbearable and pain relief becomes a woman’s only hope… This is not the natural cry of a woman in labour bringing a child to birth, although if you have only ever witnessed childbirth in a medicalized setting you might be forgiven for thinking so. This is the screaming plea of a tethered animal in pain. [Source: http://rixarixa.blogspot.com/2007/08/pushed.html]

I can only hope that the work of the many midwives in the UK to prevent the idiotic demolition of the independent midwifery services by the UK government succeeds. If it doesn’t, this will be a tragedy that is hard to comprehend.

Tricia was a rare person – charming and witty but never flippant, spiritual and "alternative" but  grounded in the real world. Her working method was rigorous but happily acknowledged that sometimes things work even when it doesn’t seem like there is the science to back it up.

Tricia elsewhere on the web:
http://www.saveindependentmidwifery.org/images/stories/pdfs/practising-midwife-feb-07.pdf
http://birthinangus.org.uk/index/news-app/story.23/title.-10-steps-pioneer (see links from there)

All I can say is, if you’re about to have or are planning to have a baby – get the facts - read some natural birth books. This isn’t hippy stuff, its the actual physical process that is intended by nature, that current methods fight against.  Personally I always thought that going to hospital was for when something was wrong with you. Since when was birth a problem to be solved?

…but this is where the really tough part about birth comes in. There’s life at stake. Fear and litigious tendencies make us feel risk-averse and with this mindset natural birth can seem like you are not doing the best for your child. The trouble is that this is assuming you know the risks of an un-natural hospital birth. I bet you don’t. Ask questions, then ask more questions. Then do what feels instinctively right. It’s a journey to be travelled, but it is a wonderful one.

Grails Exchange, 77 slides later

I just got back to the countryside after a rather enjoyable day at Grails Exchange 2007. I’ve never been to a developers conference before, unless you count the old ATARI ST demo coding party or two of my youth. The Barbican was a good venue… but man that is one horrible mofo of a lump of concrete hell. Single-glazed windows everywhere too, the heating bills must be INSANE I tell you. The event was well organized by Skills Matter and there was a good "workshop" kind of atmosphere.

Anyway I met some great people and saw some great talks. I started the day with Scott Davis‘ keynote "Groovy and Grails by the numbers" which served, for me at least, as a strong motivational talk on spreading the Groovy and Grails word. I thoroughly enjoyed it and his showmanship.

Then we had an interesting panel discussion, though I confess that I was busy documenting the g:meta and g:encodeAs tags while it was going on, and struggling due to codehaus server problems. I mentioned these in my slides and realised that I hadn’t documented them yet, shame on me.

Next up was Joe Walnes talking about Sitemesh, a baby he created back in 1999 – yes that is correct, it is nearly 10 years old! I knew very little about sitemesh and thanks to his energetic talk I know a lot more. I have some plans to incorporate some more sitemesh features into Grails soon, now that I know what is possible.

I watched an interesting presentation by Joe Walker on DWR (Direct Web Remoting) which now includes support for Comet and some pretty crazy concepts like being able to "send" an object to all the currently connected client browsers and have it appear in their DOM. I’m going to have to look into this some more as it seems ripe for some Grails plugin work but it seems hard to see where this fits in in terms of comparative advantage compared to other ajax libraries. It is certainly a lot cleaner in the client and server due to the stub code generation.

Next up I saw Graeme give a good talk on new groovy MOP features such as "missingMethod" and some sweet dynamic programming patterns. I think MOP manipulation is going to become more and more mainstream as the APIs and mechanisms become clearer.

I then checked out Tsuyoshi Yamamoto‘s session on the Acegi plugin for Grails. The plugin looks good and does what you’d expect really for something wrapping Acegi… but something about Acegi just feels so wrong, at least in Grails land. I was sitting there scribbling notes about how I want to do authentication and authorisation for normal webapps (vs enterprise LDAP/CAS/SSO hell) for normal people. Hopefully I’ll get somewhere with it soon, I already have Authentication working but the mechanisms need refinement and then bolting on an authorisation plugin too. It just can (and must) be so much simpler than Acegi makes it.

Then it was my turn. I wondered about my content being a bit too simple for the crowd, but it was late in the day and everyone needed a break. I think most people enjoyed it and I certainly enjoyed giving it. It’s was only my second presentation like this ever, and I’m pleased with how it went although I’m not sure how good it will seem once it goes into the video podcast….

Anyway, people gave me some nice comments on the style of it – I went through major hoops to try to avoid bullet points and people were smiling rather than groaning. 77 slides were included. There’s a lot more work involved in this kind of presentation, it took ages to put it all together! Hopefully it will come easier in time.

Thanks to Bernd Schiffer, Jez Rayner, Joe Walnes, Scott Hickey for his loan of DVI->VGA (WHY did they change the plug between iBook and MacBook?!), Jeff Brown, Stuart Clayman, Glen Smith, Dierk Koenig, Sven Haiges and all the other fine people.

Grails and Groovy get financial backing

Graeme Rocher today announced G2One Inc. has been formed with VC capital and will be actively developing the open source Groovy and Grails code bases.

This is fantastic news – it will really strengthen Groovy and Grails’ position in the market place. In the medium term it should mean faster turnaround on developments and improved documentation, something we’ll all enjoy.

Congratulations to Graeme, Guillaume and Alex on their enterprise.