The past week’s been pretty calm, in terms of news, but a few of them really stood out.

Netflix again leverages Groovy for scripting its user experience API (additional coverage following last week’s announcement).

The Gradleware team delivered Gradle 2.3! Congrats guys!

And closer to home, a very important discussion about moving Groovy into a foundation has started, inviting members and representatives of different foundations to join and offer their views and experience on the matter.

So what’s Groovy this week? The Groovy community is still celebrating the 4.5+ million downloads of Groovy last year, is drive testing the upcoming Gradle 2.3, while Greach is announcing its impressive roster of speakers.

But there’s an item of news dear to my heart this week, with the “go to production” message from Dierk about Groovy in Action, second edition! Many times the book has been revised to catch up with the latest and greatest of Groovy, and this new edition will bring you up-to-date with Groovy 2.4, so you can expect the official print and e-book final versions imminently!

Congrats to the GrooScript team with the GrooScript 1.0 release! With GrooScript, if you will, you can have a full Groovy experience, from the build (Gradle), backend (Groovy, Grails, Ratpack), mobile (Groovy on Android), up to the front-end web layer with Groovy translated into JavaScript!

Another impressive and widely acclaimed release is the first milestone of Grails 3! You can have a look at the novelties in Grails 3, and watch a screencast about it.

This week is a bit more positive than the previous with the announcement of the release of Groovy 2.4!

But some interesting and thoughtful pieces have also been written about last week’s sad news about Pivotal divesting in Groovy and Grails.

In spite of this, SpringOne2GX 2015 has been announced with 4 Groovy and Grails tracks, in Washington DC, mid-September.

Last but not least, the second edition of Groovy in Action is going into production!

The Groovy team is happy to announce the release of Groovy 2.4.0!

The big highlight of this release is the Android support, which allows developers to write Android applications fully using Groovy, with much less boilerplate code than raw Java.

The team also focused on various improvements in terms of performance, smaller bytecode generation, or memory consumption.

Other interesting aspects worth noticing in this release are:

• traits can use the @SelfType annotation with static type checking enabled to restrict to what classes traits can be applied
• GDK methods improvements
• some refinements to existing AST transformations
• further Groovysh improvements as well.

Please have a look at the full release notes for Groovy 2.4 to know more about the new features and all the interesting tickets closed.

This week’s edition of Groovy Weekly is a bit peculiar, as the big news of the week is Pivotal’s announcement that it will stop funding the Groovy and Grails projects.

As a result those popular Open Source projects are now seeking a new home!

You can read Guillaume Laforge’s and Graeme Rocher’s announcements to hear a bit more about the story. And if your company is interested in further funding the projects, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Pivotal just announced it’s decision to stop sponsoring and funding the development of the popular Groovy and Grails Open Source projects. As a result, both Groovy and Grails are looking for new sponsors willing to further help develop the projects full steam!

The Groovy programming language has been around for a while for more than 11 years. During that time, it has nicely evolved from a side hobby project to the very mature and successful alternative language it is today, used by Fortune 500 companies throughout the world, in various projects and contexts.

The Groovy development team released the second release candidate of Groovy 2.4, please be sure to check your applications with this version and report any issue you may be finding, so that we can all ensure 2.4 is a rock-solid release.

Note the publication of MrHaki’s Gradle Goodness Notebook! If you’re using Gradle, this is worth the investment to have that resource handy for mastering your build automation.

Releases

• Groovy 2.4 second release candidate, please help testing it!
• Spring Boot 1.2.1 released
• The Windows installer for Groovy 2.3.9 is available
• Grooscript Gradle plugin 0.9 released
• Groovy Android library SwissKnife 1.2 released with @Parcelable transformation

Articles

• Jochen “Blackdrag” Theodorou behind the scenes of bytecode optimizations for improving array access performance
• Doug Borg describes what makes a good build.gradle
• Reinout Korbee writes about running your Antlr DSL as a Groovy script
• Some Groovy magic by Erwan Arzur
• Preventing naming collisions in Grails by Albert van Veen
• Bertrand Goetzman shows how to display data coming from REST with DataFX / JavaFX and Ratpack (article in French)
• Robert McIntosh on Grails with a billion record Mongo collection
• Peter Ledbrook on Groovy in the light of Java 8
• Feedback from GrailsConf in India by Amit Jain

Presentations

• Dan Woods will be speaking about Ratpack online during an O’Reilly webinar
• Groovy in 2014 and beyond by Guillaume Laforge at SpringOne2GX 2014
• Making Spring Boot even groovier by Graeme Rocher at SpringOne2GX 2014
• Slides form “Demystifying Gradle DSL” presented at GrailsConf 2015, New Delhi

Interviews

• Guillaume Laforge interviewed at Devoxx 2014 about what makes Groovy the Swift of the Android world

Books

• MrHaki publishes the Gradle Goodness Notebook
• Marco Vermeulen enjoys the terrific section on writing nested Gradle plugin extension DSLs in Tim Berglund’s Gradle beyond the basics book

News

• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen Grails Diary
• Testatoo, a web user interface testing tool with a Groovy DSL

Mailing-list

• A debate about JVM application installers with Gradle and more

Code snippets

• Iván Lopez participates in the Spring Boot book contest with a full Groovy solution! Star the project to make it win!
• Dan Woods shares some examples of standalone Ratpack 0.9.13

Tweets

• Guillaume Laforge celebrated the 1000th star on Github for Groovy, keep on spreading the word and double that number!
• Groovy Weekly released its 2000th news item last week!
• Ratpack is teasing that the next release is going to be a big “one”
• Groovy 2.4.0-rc-2 available through GVM
• Cédric Champeau asks the twittosphere what they’d like to see him speak about at GR8Conf
• Andrew Reitz managed to get Spock tests running on Android
• Vishal Savajiani claims Groovy is a powerful language! For the Internet of Things, for the Cloud, and more.
• The Groovy Android library SwissKnife is ready for Groovy 2.4, reports Eugene Kamenev
• Mike Milinkovich is excited to see Gradleware bringing first-class Gradle support to Eclipse
• Iván López demonstrates you can be a full stack developer using only Groovy with a concrete example
• Spring Boot is ready for Groovy 2.4 announces Andy Wilkinson
• Dan Woods compares the performance of Ratpack with Vert.x

Events

• Groovy at DevNexus, with an epic keynote with the Groovy puzzlers and a Groovy workshop, by the JFrog team
• The Greach Call for Paper is closing in 10 days, get ready!
• Last week for the GR8Conf Call for Paper, hurry up!
• Cédric Champeau will speak about Groovy at Niort for the Poitou-Charentes JUG on January 20th
• Greach announces its first accepted speakers: Russel Winder
• Only 2 days left for the early bird tickets for Greach
• Dan Woods will be speaking at Greach about Ratpack
• Another speaker announced for Greach with MrHaki
• GR8Conf US announces multiple tracks for the workshop day

First of all, let me wish you a very Groovy year! May 2015 fulfill all its promises, keep you healthy, bring joy and hapiness around! And of course, may it be filled with tons of bits of Groovy code!

Following up my plea for more stars on Github, we went from below 600 stars to beyond 1000! But we don’t need to stop there, so let’s keep starring and spreading the word!

Here’s the end of a pretty Groovy year coming, giving room for an even groovier one!

I hope you all enjoyed the holidays, and that you’re ready to pour in some more drops of Groovy into your software mixes!

Don’t forget to continue starring the Groovy project on Github, if you haven’t done so, so we try to reach 1000 in the new year!

What are going to be your new year’s resolutions? Perhaps some contributions to Groovy’s documentation, some bug fixes or new features?