1.4.1 Development Environment Features - Reference Documentation
Authors: Graeme Rocher, Peter Ledbrook, Marc Palmer, Jeff Brown, Luke Daley, Burt Beckwith, Lari Hotari
Version: 2.3.8
1.4.1 Development Environment Features
Interactive Mode and Console Enhancements
Grails 2.0 features brand new console output that is more concise and user friendly to consume. An example of the new output when running tests can be seen below:


Reloading Agent
Grails 2.0 reloading mechanism no longer uses class loaders, but instead uses a JVM agent to reload changes to class files. This results in greatly improved reliability when reloading changes and also ensures that the class files stored in disk remain consistent with the class files loaded in memory, which reduces the need to run the clean command.New Test Report and Documentation Templates
There are new templates for displaying test results that are clearer and more user friendly than the previous reports:

Use a TOC for Project Docs
The old documentation engine relied on you putting section numbers into the gdoc filenames. Although convenient, this effectively made it difficult to restructure your user guide by inserting new chapters and sections. In addition, any such restructuring or renaming of section titles resulted in breaking changes to the URLs.You can now use logical names for your gdoc files and define the structure and section titles in a YAML table-of-contents file, as described in the section on the documentation engine. The logical names appear in the URLs, so as long as you don't change those, your URLs will always remain the same no matter how much restructuring or changing of titles you do.Grails 2.0 even provides a migrate-docs command to aid you in migrating existing gdoc user guides.Enhanced Error Reporting and Diagnosis
Error reporting and problem diagnosis has been greatly improved with a new errors view that analyses stack traces and recursively displays problem areas in your code:
Line | Method
->> 9 | getValue in Book.groovy
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
| 7 | getBookValue in BookService.groovy
| 886 | runTask . . in ThreadPoolExecutor.java
| 908 | run in ''
^ 662 | run . . . . in Thread.java
H2 Database and Console
Grails 2.0 now uses the H2 database instead of HSQLDB, and enables the H2 database console in development mode (at the URI /dbconsole) so that the in-memory database can be easily queried from the browser:
Plugin Usage Tracking
To enhance community awareness of the most popular plugins an opt-in plugin usage tracking system has been included where users can participate in providing feedback to the plugin community on which plugins are most popular.This will help drive the roadmap and increase support of key plugins while reducing the need to support older or less popular plugins thus helping plugin development teams focus their efforts.Dependency Resolution Improvements
There are numerous improvements to dependency resolution handling via Ivy including:- Grails now makes a best effort to cache the previous resolve and avoid resolving again unless you change
BuildConfig.groovy
. - Plugins dependencies now appear in the dependency report generated by
grails dependency-report
- Plugins published with the release plugin now publish their transitive plugin dependencies in the generated POM which are later resolved.
- It is now possible to customize the ivy cache directory via
BuildConfig.groovy
grails.project.dependency.resolution = {
cacheDir "target/ivy-cache"
}
- You can change the ivy cache directory for all projects via
settings.groovy
grails.dependency.cache.dir = "${userHome}/.ivy2/cache"
- It is now possible to completely disable resolution from inherited repositories (repositories defined by other plugins):
grails.project.dependency.resolution = { repositories {
inherits false // Whether to inherit repository definitions from plugins
…
}
…
}
- It is now possible to easily disable checksum validation errors:
grails.project.dependency.resolution = {
checksums false // whether to verify checksums or not
}