Asciidoctor is a Ruby tool, but luckily we can use AsciidoctorJ to use Asciidoctor in Java code. The Asciidoctor Gradle plugin relies on AsciidoctorJ to run. AsciidoctorJ allows us to write custom extensions in Java (or Groovy), but we can still use Asciidoctor extensions written in Ruby with the Gradle plugin.

In the following example we use the emoji-inline-macro from Asciidoctor extensions lab. This is an extension written in Ruby. We create a new directory for our sample and create a lib folder. Inside the lib directory we copy the file emoji-inline-macro.rb and the supporting directory emoji-inline-macro. These files are all in the Asciidoctor extensions lab repository. After we have copied the files we should have the following structure:

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To apply a plugin in our Gradle build script we can use the plugins DSL. The plugins DSL is very concise and allows Gradle to be more efficient and more in control when loading the plugin. Normally the plugin we define is fetched from the Gradle plugin portal. If we have our own repository, for example on the intranet of our company, we have to define that extra repository with a pluginRepositories configuration block in the settings.gradle file of our project.

In the following sample we have a plugin mrhaki.gradle.version-file that is stored in the company intranet repository with the URL http://intranet/artifactory/libs-release/.

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This is the first of a series of posts. Where we will use machine learning to rate movies. For this task we're not going to watch all the movies. I assume it's good enough to just read the plot. We'll use Markov chains to rate the movies and as an added bonus we can also generate new movie plots for awesome (or terrible) movies. In this first part we'll get the data and change it into a more usable format. We can use the data from IMDB, which is published on ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/misc/movies/database/. Of interest are the plots and the ratings.

Plots look like this:

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The Pair class in Ratpack is an easy way to create a growing data structure, passed on via Promise methods. A Pair object has a left and right part containing data. These parts can even be other Pair objects. Since Ratpack 1.4.0 the Promise class has methods to set the right or left part of a Pair: left, flatLeft, right and flatRight. The result of these methods is a Promise<Pair> object. The input can be Promise type or a Function that can use a previous Promise.

In the following example specification we use the different new methods to create a Pair. We also create a simple Ratpack server with a asynchronous HTTP client implementation to simulate remote calls returning a Promise:

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In functional programming we have the concept of an identity function. An identity function returns the same result as the input of the function. Groovy has a lot of functional paradigms including a identity function. Of course in Groovy's case it is an identity closure. It is defined as a constant in the Closure class: Closure.IDENTITY. If we use this closure we get the same result as the argument we provide.

In the following example we first create our own identity closure. Next we use the built-in Closure.IDENTITY closure:

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In the last few years we used Vert.x to prototype and develop several IoT related projects. Most of the projects use MQTT for lightweight messaging between the connected devices (or things ;)) and the applications. The messaging is handled by an external broker liker Mosquitto. Instead of using an external broker it’s now possible to connect MQTT enabled devices directly to Vert.x using the Vert.x MQTT server project. Although the project is still in Tech Preview we’ll show you how use it to create a MQTT server within Vert.x. At first we add the snapshot repository to our build.gradle file.

repositories {
    jcenter()
    maven {
        url "https://oss.sonatype.org/content/groups/staging/"
    }
}

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Groovy adds a lot of useful methods to the Java JDK classes. One of them is the sleep method that is added to all objects. With the sleep method we can add a pause to our code. The sleep method accepts a sleep time in milli seconds. The implementation of the method will always wait for he given amount of milli seconds even if interrupted. But we can add a closure as extra argument, which is invoked when the sleep method is interrupted. We should return true for the closure to really interrupt, otherwise we use false.

In the following example we use the sleep method to pause the bedtime method of the User class. We run the bedtime method in a thread and after 2000 milli seconds we intercept the thread. The sleep method still wait for 5 seconds, before ending:

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Grails normally will run any *Bootstrap classes at startup. A Bootstrap class has a init and destroy closure. The init closure is invoked during startup and destroy when the application stops. The class name must end with Bootstrap and be placed in the grails-app/init folder. Since Grails 3.2 we can skip the execution of Bootstrap classes by setting the Java system property grails.bootstrap.skip with the value true.

In the following example Bootstrap class we simply add a println to see the effect of using the system property grails.bootstrap.skip:

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When we use the property syntax of Groovy to get the value for a property, Groovy will actually try to invoke a get method for that property if it is available. So for example if we have the statement user.name actually user.getName() is invoked. If we want to reference a property field directly, so bypassing the get method, we must place an @ in front of the property field name. In the previous example we would write user.@name to get the field value directly. The same rules apply for setting a value for a property with the Groovy syntax. If we write user.name = 'mrhaki' then actually user.setName('mrhaki') is invoked. We can use the @ prefix also to set a value without invoking the set method for that property. So in our example it would be user.@name = 'mrhaki' and the setName method is not used.

In the following example we have a class Person with a name property. We add a getName method which formats the name field and returns the value. In a subclass User we access the name property from the super class using the Groovy property syntax and with the @ prefix:

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In Asciidoctor we can add an anchor with an ID to a section or title and then reference it in a link. The title of the section is used as link text. We can alter that when we define the link, but if we rely on the default behaviour we create a title for our section including the caption label and number. This way the created link points to the correct section and the text contains the caption text and number for that section.

In the following example markup we can see how we can use the caption label and section counter as attributes in the title. We do this with the title attribute of a section. By using the single quotes we tell Asciidoctor to interpret the attributes. We must also make sure we set the caption attribute to an empty string value. This disables the default caption creation of Asciidoctor for our section. Finally we need to provide an ID for the section using the #ID syntax:

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Asciidoctor has some built-in attributes to work with captions for certain content blocks. For example the table-section attribute defines the caption label (by default Table) that is prefixed to a counter for all tables in the document. When we transform our markup Asciidoctor will insert the text Table followed by the table number. By default the caption for listing blocks is disabled, but we can easily enable it with the listing-caption attribute.

In the following markup we enable the caption for listing blocks and set the value to Listing. This will add the text Listing followed by the listing section counter to the output.

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