NOTE: this post updates an earlier blog post written for version 0.8 of the Karma test runner.

For my current project we are using Maven to build our AngularJS application. Furthermore we use Sonar (recently renamed to SonarCube) to monitor our code standards / best practices and unit test coverage. In this blog post we describe how to integrate version 0.10 of the the Karma test runner with Maven and how to add your AngularJS (or any JavaScript) application to SonarQube.

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Since Grails 2.2 by default the run-app command will launch the Grails application in a separate Java Virtual Machine. This is called forked Tomcat execution in Grails. This way the class path of the Grails build system and the application will not intervene and also both processes will have their own memory settings. We can see the settings in grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy where we find the configuration property grails.project.fork.run. When we want to debug our application in an IDE like IntelliJ IDEA we cannot use the Debug command, because this will only allow us to debug the Grails build system. We will not reach breakpoints in our source code. But Grails 2.3 introduces an extra argument for the run-app command: --debug-fork. If we use this extra argument the JVM running the Grails application will stop and listen for a debug session to be attached and then continue. We can configure a Debug configuration in IntelliJ IDEA (or another IDE) to attach to the waiting Grails application and use breakpoints and other debugging tools like we are used to.

Suppose we have a Grails application named forked-debug and we have created a project in IDEA for this application. We click on the Select Run/Debug Configuration button and select Edit Configurations...:

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To generate an HTML select we can use the Grails tag <g:select .../>. We use the optionValue attribute to specify a specific property we want to be used as the value. But we can also define a closure for the optionValue attribute to further customize the value that is shown to the user.

Suppose we have a simple domain class Book with a couple of properties. We want to combine multiple properties as the text for the HTML select options. In the following GSP we define first a <g:select .../> tag where we simply use the title property. In the next <g:select .../> tag we use a closure to combine multiple properties.

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Grails 2.3 added a lot of support for RESTful services. For example we can now use a respond() method in our controllers to automatically render resources. The respond() method accepts a resource instance as argument and a map of attributes that can be passed. We can use the includes and excludes keys of the map to pass which fields of our resources need to be included or excluded in the response. This way we can render partial responses based on a request parameter value.

First we start with a simple domain class Book:

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