Grom: A multi-platform unified notification plugin for Grails (Growl, Notify OSD)

grails install-plugin grom

In addition to send default notifications you can also send custom notifications by Grom-ing a String:

"bootstrapping application".grom()

If you, at some point in the future, decide to remove the from plugin, either before packaging to a production environment or some other reason. Keep in mind that any custom Grom-ing will break your application as the grom() method will not be available. This can be resolved by using something like:

class MyController {
	def pluginManager
	…
	if (pluginManager.getGrailsPlugin('grom')) "grom this String".grom()
}

The Grom plugin can be in a production package, as it will just not do anything if no notification agent is present. It may spit out a warning to the logfile, but that can be ignored.

Development of this plugin was inspired by N.A.D.D. Neutralizer, a plugin to decrease development latency by using the speech synthesizer to notify you when a project was up and running. While this was very useful at the time and certainly has it's uses (me and my colleagues even gave feedback to improve support), it was a bit too obtrusive for our liking as it started iTunes if not running and at some point you just wished it stopped talking.

So what would be better than to use Growl instead, as it is unobtrusive and the whole reason for running a notification daemon is to unify messaging into a single location. So I developed Grom initially for Growl on Mac OS X, and I added multi-platform support later by including support for Growl for Windows and Notify OSD for Linux which is by default shipped with Ubuntu.

More screenshots are available in the Screenshots tab.

Mac OS X

Linux / Ubuntu

apt-get install libnotify-bin

While Grom will now work, there are a number of limitations with the default implementation of Notify OSD on Ubuntu:

• the timeout parameter is broken (notifications stay on the screen too long)
• the notifications cannot be customized
• grouping of notifications does not work

Windows

If you do not have any of the following notification daemons installed or if you're using a platform which is not -yet?- supported, the Grom plugin will just not send any notifications. Which means you can keep it in a project repository where multiple people work on the same project, without breaking the project on machines that do not support unified notifications.

How do I send a notification?

"Foo".grom()
"Bar".grom()
4.times { "I have been gromming for ${it} times!".grom() }

I am seeing the following error in my logfile:

2010-11-25 14:45:16,079 [main] ERROR plugins.DefaultGrailsPlugin  - Grom: please install libnotify in order to receive notifications from the Grom plugin
2010-11-25 14:45:16,082 [main] ERROR plugins.DefaultGrailsPlugin  -       see http://grails.org/plugin/grom for more information

This message is shown when you're running your application + grom plugin on a supported platform, but a required program is missing. For example, the message above is shown when you're running Linux but libnotify is not available. When this is showing up in catalina.out when you're running your application on an Apache Tomcat server, you can just ignore it as any 'grom' calls will be ignored by the plugin. However, if you run Apache Tomcat on your development machine and you would like to receive notifications, you need to install the required library. In case of the above example you need to execute the following command on Ubuntu:

apt-get install libnotify-bin

I have installed Growl For Windows but I do not see any notifications?

Grom plugin on Mac OS X with Growl

Grom plugin on Mac OS X with Growl, custom notifications and multiple notifications after eachother

Example code for custom notification:

class BootStrap {
	def init = { servletContext ->
		// grom what's happening
		"bootstrapping application".grom()
		…
	}
}

If you, at some point in the future, decide to remove the from plugin, either before packaging to a production environment or some other reason. Keep in mind that any custom Grom-ing will break your application as the grom() method will not be available. This can be resolved by using something like:

class MyController {
	def pluginManager
	…
	if (pluginManager.getGrailsPlugin('grom')) "grom this String".grom()
}

Grom plugin on Ubuntu with Notify OSD

Grom plugin on Ubuntu with Notify OSD and custom notifications