We’re only mid April but what a year it’s been so far! From Groovy & Grails’ loss of funding, leading Grails to a new home at Object Computing Inc. and Groovy at the Apache Software Foundation, to Guillaume Laforge joining Restlet and Cédric joining GradleWare. Against all odds, Groovy released its 2.4 version with the Android support, and the big 3.0 release of Grails saw the light of day. And on another personal note… I’ve finished my first marathon! What’s next for the rest of the year?

I hope you all had a Groovy Easter, with baskets full of eggs and chocolate!

Little update on the Groovy infrastructure, as the project moves into incubation at Apache, the JIRA issue tracker has moved, and don’t forget that the Groovy mailing-lists are also moving.

Releases

• SwissKnife 1.2.3 released, the Swiss knife for for Android development with Groovy
• Ratpack 0.9.15 released
• Spock Subjects Collaborators Extension 1.0.3 released by Marcin Grzejszczak
• Grails 3.0.1 released
• ElasticSearch Groovy client v1.5.0 released

Articles

• Grails 3.0 built upon Spring Boot and Gradle on JaxEnter
• Using Android product flavors to build full and demo version of an application, by Manij Shrestha

News

• The Groovy JIRA has now moved to Apache
• Gradle has a brand new forum powered by Discourse
• Tim Fox shares a glimpse of the upcoming new Vert.x website
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen Grails Diary week 14

Presentations

• SpringOne2GX 2014
  • Ratpack and Grails 3 by Lari Hotari
  • Building awesome APIs with Grails by Chris Latimer
  • Gradle for Android by Ken Kousen
  • Introduction to Grails 3.0 by Dan Vega
  • Creating and running a Grails 3 application by Dan Vega

Tweets

• Creating iOS applications with Groovy and GrooScript, using ReactJS native
• April Fools from Apache Groovy mentor says Groovy could graduate on April 1st already
• Spring Boot 1.1.12 available on GVM
• Spring Boot 1.2.3 available on GVM
• Grails 3.0.1 available on GVM

Mailing-list posts

• Groovy’s JIRA moved to Apache

Books

• Peter Ledbrook shares early draft chapters of his Practical Groovy self-published book

Events

• GR8Conf US 2015 registration is open

Today marks the end of the sponsorship of the Groovy and Grails projects by Pivotal. The projects are now turning a new page in their lives. For Groovy, the project is going to wear some feathers, with joining the Apache Software Foundation. And Grails is releasing its major 3.0 version.

With Groovy’s move to Apache, it’s important to notice that the Groovy mailing-lists are moving. You must subscribe to the new mailing-lists at Apache, as we won’t force-subscribe people, so you’ll have to opt-in to these new lists.

The big news today is that Groovy has now passed the vote for entering the Apache Software Foundation incubator! Thus, in the coming weeks and months, while going through the incubation process, you can expect some changes in terms of infrastructure (moving sources, issue tracker, mailng-lists, etc) to be taking place, but don’t worry, we’ll keep you informed along the way.

This past week, we’ve had some new releases of Groovy, as well as the second release candidate for Grails 3! Grails 3 is really really close now, get ready, it’s gonna rock the house!

The Groovy team is happy to announce another 2.4 release, with Groovy 2.4.3.

We noticed some regressions that needed our attention, and we decided to release rapidly after our recent 2.4.2 release of last week. Please upgrade to 2.4.3 if you’re on the 2.4.x line.

You can read about the tickets resolved in our changelog: http://groovy-lang.org/changelogs/changelog-2.4.3.html

And you can download the Groovy distribution as usual on the new Groovy website.

I’d also like to announce that Groovy passed the vote to enter the Apache Software Foundation Incubator! In the coming weeks, we’ll be through the incubation process, likely for a few months, where we’ll be moving things around (sources, JIRA, mailing-lists, etc), so you can expect a bit of change, but we’ll keep you posted on how we progress along.

The Groovy development team is happy to announce the bug fix releases of Groovy 2.4.2 and Groovy 2.3.11.

For the 2.4.2 release, some key performance improvements have found their way in static compilation mode, so you might be happy to see your programs snappier!

Along with those two releases, you’ll notice lots more documentation has been written on the new Groovy website, as well as important updates to existing topics. You might want to have a look at the following new or improved sections:

Following-up last week’s decision of the Groovy team to join the Apache Software Foundation, this week, a proposal has been made and submitted, and Apache has announced it on its blog. So the process is now really officially started and on its track!

Releases

• Grails 3.0 RC-1 released
• GVM 2.4.0 released with broadcast and offline checks optimizations
• Groovy Grails Toolsuite 3.6.4 released with Groovy 2.4 support

Articles

• The Groovy team and Apache members collaborated on a proposal to join the Apache Software Foundation
• Matt Raible interviewed Guillaume Laforge about Groovy moving to Apache
• Darryl Taft from eWeek is covering the proposal of Groovy to join the Apache incubator
• Paul Krill writes on CIO “dumped by Pivotal, Groovy moves to Apache”
• Kay Ewbank on Groovy joining the Apache Software Foundation
• Groovy hands-on, in French
• A new Griffon / JavaFX tutorial is available
• A flamewar against Gradle which is said to suffer from the halting problem
• Allegro Tech is sharing its success story adopting Gradle

News

• The Apache Software Foundation announces Groovy’s submission to become an official Apache project
• At the Adobe Summit, Time Warner Cable announced some of its Gradle plugins to work with Adobe tools
• A very interesting contribution from JetBrain’s Peter Gromov has been merged into Groovy’s master to speedup compilation
• OpenCSVIterator: a useful library for processing flat text files in Groovy and Java
• GR8CRM, a suite of Grails plugins for Customer Relationship Management by Göran Ehrsson
• A nice online Groovy playground by Tim Roes

Presentations

• Great introduction to Groovy by Michał Mally at the Groovy user group in Poland
• Groovy for Java developers, by Peter Ledbrook, recorded during SpringOne2GX 2014
• Groovy browser automation with Geb, by Colin Harrington, recorded at SpringOne2GX 2014
• A video introduction to Gradle for Android Studio

Tweets

• Cédric Champeau is annoyed when people reduce Groovy to just a “dynamic” language when it’s much more than that
• Ken Kousen tasting a Groovy Smoothie
• Matthew McCullough Groovy JMeter plugin is moving to Github, like the many Google Code projects following Google’s closing
• GrooScript plugin working for Grails 3 RC-1

Mailing-list posts

• The Groovy incubation proposal is being discussed on the Apache mailing-lists

Podcasts

• Ken Kousen published Groovy Podcast episode 8

Code snippets

• Using RxJs from GrooScript with Groovy’s @BaseScript transformation

Books

• You can find Ken Kousen’s Making Java Groovy book code samples on Manning’s website

Events

• Registration for SpringOne2GX 2015 is open
• Guillaume Laforge will be speaking about Groovy’s continuous delivery at the SwampUp conference
• At the Gradle Summit, Netflix’ build team will share lessons learned about Gradle plugins

Big news for this week with the intention of the Groovy project to join the Apache Software Foundation! And if you wnat to know more about who actually contributed to Groovy over the years, Cédric detailed that on his blog.

Releases

• GMavenPlus 1.5 released
• GrooScript 1.0.1 released
• GrooScript Gradle plugin 1.0.1 released
• Android-Spock 1.2 released working with Spock 1.0
• GVM 2.3.0 released with new “outdated” command to know if newer candidates are available

Articles

• Guillaume Laforge announces the intention of the Groovy project to join the Apache Software Foundation
• Cédric Champeau wrote a very interesting and insightful analysis on who contributed to Groovy over the years
• John K. Waters from ADTMag on Groovy to join Apache Software Foundation following up an interview with Guillaume Laforge
• Jochen Theodorou brainstorms on the path towards a revamped MOP for Groovy
• MrHaki’s Awesome Asciidoctor: Use inline extension DSL with Gradle
• MrHaki’s Gradle Goodness: Define system properties in gradle.properties
• New features for Gradle Coming in IntelliJ IDEA 14.1 by Andrey Cheptsov
• Groovy, GrooScript with React.JS
• Marcin Zajączkowski on Spock 1.0 with Groovy 2.4 configuration comparison in Maven and Gradle
• Benoît Hédiard writes about how to publish your Grails 3 plugin to Bintray
• The Ratpack team published more information on how the Ratpack documentation is working and how code samples are tested
• Ken Kousen in “If a method arg is a closure, for crying out loud pass it a closure”
• Faster Groovy Compilation in IntelliJ IDEA 14.1 by Peter Gromov
• Grails tip: Rendering errors of multiple beans by Albert van Veen
• Get Groovy with JRebel and Grails by Adam Koblentz
• Working with SASS scripts in Grails 2.3 by Mansi Arora
• Customize your Grails test reports by Igor Shults
• Another method for admin screens with Grails by Mike Hostetler

News

• The GVM project just reached 400 stars on Github, keep star’ing!
• New documentation on Groovy meta-annotations authored by Cédric Champeau
• Kunal Dabir created a simple DSL to create directory trees and files
• An updated roadmap for GrooScript, including support for require.js
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 10 of 2015

Tweets

• Thanks to Luke Daley and Will Erickson, Dagger 2 will work out of the box with Groovy sources and Gradle 2.4
• Cédric Champeau documented how you can use closures as annotation parameters
• Cédric Champeau is so much into AST transformations that he wrongly coined the Apache Software Foundation with the AST acronym instead of the ASF
• Using Reactor with Groovy is a nice experience in data processing says David Dawson
• Dan Woods reminds us that Ratpack has a forum in case you need help getting started
• Tim Yates found some Groovy biscuits for the discerning Groovy developer

Code snippets

• Using RxJs with GrooScript
• Iván López authored a handy Groovy script to generate the HTML of the Greach conference speakers pages

Events

• GR8Conf Europe 2015 announces a first batch of speakers

The Groovy team is happy to announce its intention to join the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

Following up the recent announcement from Pivotal to end funding of full time developers for the Groovy programming language project, the team thought it would be appropriate to demonstrate to the Groovy community that the project is here for the long term, regardless of any funding from particular sponsoring organizations and regardless of any changes to the team of committers over time.

This round number edition is pretty busy!

Last week ended with a pretty sad note, with the news of Leonard Nimoy’s passing, the famous vulcan extraterrestrial from Star Trek. This certainly resonates with the Groovy community (and geeks & fans out large) because of our very own Spock testing framework. So let’s all gather and have a thought for this great actor and for his family.

But as a tribute to this great actor and character, the long awaited news is that the Spock testing framework releases its 1.0 version!