Programming Languages on Power

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  • 1.  Any updates on Groovy, Grails on Power?

    Posted Thu January 05, 2023 12:49 PM
    Any updates on Groovy, Grails on Power?

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    Jim Mason
    Director Services Engineering
    Cape Cod Bay Systems
    North Attleboro MA
    1-555-555-5555
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  • 2.  RE: Any updates on Groovy, Grails on Power?

    Posted Thu January 05, 2023 02:46 PM
    Hmm, that's an interesting question.  It appear that neither groovy nor grails are available in RHEL, EPEL or fedora even for x86-64 today.  The only option I see is to use this SDKMAN referenced here:  https://sdkman.io/ to install on Intel.  However, since a JDK is typically architecture aware that would imply that it would need to be ported.

    I've been digging around a bit and #1 - it appears that Groovy/Grails have never been ported to Power (and porting computing languages is typically very expensive and definitely not going to happen in 2023) and #2 for some reason Red Hat doesn't make either available directly.  I'm assuming that is because they are focused on the OpenJDK world and their own Red Hat Runtimes, all of which are available on Linux on Power.

    I think that's the best answer we can provide at this point, unless someone wants to step up and port groovy/gradle to ppc64le.
    ​​

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    Gerrit
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  • 3.  RE: Any updates on Groovy, Grails on Power?

    Posted Thu January 05, 2023 03:21 PM
    Not surprised Red Hat doesn't support it.
    That said, run Ubuntu and Open JDK instead.

    Power can run Ubuntu 22.04, or later5
    https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/linux-on-systems?topic=lpo-linux-distributions-virtualization-options-power10-linux-power-servers

    Open JDK 11 or higher can be installed on Ubuntu 22.x
    https://tecadmin.net/how-to-install-java-on-ubuntu-22-04/#:~:text=Default%20Ubuntu%2022.04%20repositories%20contain,install%20a%20specific%20Java%20version.

    That should allow Groovy 3 or 4 and Grails 6
    https://docs.grails.org/latest/


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    Jim Mason
    Director Services Engineering
    Cape Cod Bay Systems
    North Attleboro MA
    1-555-555-5555
    ------------------------------



  • 4.  RE: Any updates on Groovy, Grails on Power?

    Posted Fri January 06, 2023 03:50 AM
    Hi,

    I have just tested installation of sdkman on ppc64le (RHEL 8.6 in this case, but shouldn't matter). The sdkman tool is just a shell-script for easy install of various tools for the JVM ecosystem (different java distributions, groovy, grails, micronaut and many more). Installation of Java/JVM might be troublesome as it requires a specific ppc64le version which sdkman might not support.  For Grails, Groovy and other tools distributed as java bytecode this should not matter, if you have installed the Java JVM from your Linux distribution or otherwise.

    I have tested installation of Grails and Groovy through sdkman and both seems to work fine.

    sdk install grails
    grails create-app power ; cd power;
    $ ./gradlew bootRun
    > Task :compileJava NO-SOURCE
    > Task :compileGroovy
    > Task :buildProperties
    > Task :processResources
    > Task :classes
    > Task :bootRunMainClassName
    
    > Task :bootRun
    OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM warning: Options -Xverify:none and -noverify were deprecated in JDK 13 and will likely be removed in a future release.
    Grails application running at http://localhost:8080 in environment: development
    ​


    sdk install groovy
    export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-17-openjdk-17.0.5.0.8-2.el8_6.ppc64le
    groovysh
    groovy:000> name = "Mark"
    ===> Mark
    groovy:000> println("Hello $name");
    Hello Mark
    

    Hope this helps :)
    Java on Power is great.

    I can do some further testing if required.


    /Mark

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    Best regards,
    Mark Nellemann
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  • 5.  RE: Any updates on Groovy, Grails on Power?

    Posted Fri January 06, 2023 10:07 AM
    And this is why we have a forum to pool ideas and approaches!  Thanks Mark, very cool!  I did the hypothetical and you put in the work.  I hadn't realized that groovy/grails just depended on the underlying JVM for code execution - that does make it a lot simpler then!

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    Gerrit
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  • 6.  RE: Any updates on Groovy, Grails on Power?

    Posted Wed January 11, 2023 01:51 PM
    I did a little additional research on this one.  Red Hat used to include Groovy and Grail in RHEL 7 but dropped it in RHEL 8 for unknown reasons, although the guess is that they were trying to avoid duplication of java functionality in both their middleware and their RHEL distribution.  They haven't had many requests for either for a long time but if there is a clear need, Red Hat would be open to the discussion of re-including them.  Having said that, it sounds like the open source community versions are functional as is, so the bonus of including RHEL would be a convenience rather than a necessity I believe.

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    Gerrit
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  • 7.  RE: Any updates on Groovy, Grails on Power?

    Posted Wed January 11, 2023 02:43 PM
    Thanks Gerrit.
    I agree with your assessment on why Red Hat doesn't include them.  It does make sense to document how Groovy and Grails can be used both on Power and on IBM i.
    I used Groovy to create smart code that automated deployments, improved data quality and modeled solutions as simple user DSLs.
    I used Grails to quickly generate CRUDS apps for reference data. Others have used Grails but invested more time to customize the UX.


    ------------------------------
    Jim Mason
    Director Services Engineering
    Cape Cod Bay Systems
    North Attleboro MA
    1-555-555-5555
    ------------------------------