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?

Hot on the heels of our 2.3.9 update, the Groovy team is happy to release the first release candidate of Groovy 2.4 as another Xmas present!

This release candidate is our upcoming new major version of Groovy, including:

• official support for the Android development platform: you can now develop full Android applications in Groovy, dramatically reducing boilerplate code while keeping performance and memory consumption at the same level as Java apps
• performance optimizations: lots of improvements have been implemented in both statically compiled Groovy code and dynamic code. (example report of an illustrative micro-benchmark)
• optimized memory use: reworked some compiler internals to reduce memory consumption
• traits refinements: like the ability to tell that a trait can only be applied to a specific type hierarchy
• and as usual, lots of bugfixes

We’re planning on releasing the final Groovy 2.4 version in January, once we’re happy with the stability and feedback from the community.

Lots among us are celebrating Christmas this week, and Groovy Weekly is happy to wish you all a Merry Christmas! And there’s also an anniversary, as it’s been one year that Groovy Weekly was launched, with the first edition on December 24th (hence my excuse to publish this column on Wednesday 24th instead of on Tuesday as usual)!

For Christmas, the Groovy team decided to release a first release candidate for Groovy 2.4, as well as a Groovy 2.3.9 update.

This has been a super busy week, in particular with the 7th edition of the Groovy Grails eXchange conference in London. You’ll find lots of slides and videos already published online, so you won’t miss a beat! For instance don’t miss this talk from Shuichisan how Groovy is used by Japan’s Rakuten mobile backend as a service platform at scale!

A special highlight in the articles section to Cédric’s article on 10 things your static language can’t do.

Almost a year since I started the Groovy Weekly newsletter. And perhaps for the first anniversary, in a handful of weeks, we’ll have reached 2000 news items shared with you all in this column!

This week is a London-ian one, as lots of the Groovy ecosystem inhabitants are migrating to the UK to celebrate the Groovy Grails eXchange conference. I’m looking forward to seeing some of you this week there. It also means that next week, you’ll likely see many links to slides and videos of the conference.

Today I highly recommend you read about the nice Groovy dedicated support for ElasticSearch! We also have a few interesting dot releases this week. And there’s the scoop that there’s a Ratpack book in the works!

Don’t forget that the Call for Papers for GR8Conf Europe / US and Greach are still open, if you want to speak about your favorite Groovy technologies and experiments!

Releases

• Groovy 2.4.0-beta-4 released
• Groovy 2.3.8 released
• Ratpack 0.9.11 released
• Gradle Bintray plugin 1.0 released with Maven Central sync
• A much faster Asset Pipeline Gradle plugin with v2.0.4
• First public version of an HTML sanity checker Gradle plugin
• GroovySparql 0.9 released

Articles

• “Making ElasticSearch Groovy-er” with a dedicated Groovy client to interact with ElasticSearch
• Jochen “blackdrag” Theodorou experiments with Java’s processing API for a stub-less Groovy joint compiler
• MrHaki’s Grails goodness: create new application without wrapper
• Testing JVM server-side JavaScript with Jasmine, Spock and Nashorn, by Evgeny Shepelyuk
• Series of articles on getting started with Gradle
• In this interview, JetBrains developer Maxim Medvedev mentions that Groovy and Apple Swift are similar in terms of IDE support, as both languages have type inference, closures, and higher order functions
• On recursive observables with RxJava, and showing how Groovy can cut verbosity down

Presentations

• Android development with Groovy, by Mario García, at CodeMotion Spain 2014

News

• Grails Diary week 48 by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen

Code snippets

• Cédric Champeau created a Docker container with GVM and Groovy installed
• A new GrooScript demo with snap.svg
• Using Firebase from your web pages with Groovy with GrooScript

Tweets

• Cédric Champeau teases for his Groovy Grails eXchange talk where he’ll explain how Groovy leverages Gradle, Asciidoctor, TeamCity for the new website
• Groovy 2.4 beta-4 available through GVM
• The GVM announcement of the availability of Groovy 2.4 beta-4 was done from Groovy’s CI server through GVM’s API
• Gradle 2.2.1 available on GVM
• Bertrand Goetzman spotted a Yeoman generator for Angular.JS + Ratpack applications
• Tomas Lin suggests a Ratatouille inspired book cover for Dan Woods’ upcoming Ratpack book
• Eugene Kamenev is showing a screenshot of an Android Wear application written in Groovy
• Roberto Guerra is having fun with Ratpack and Gulp.JS
• Groovy 2.3.8 has been released on GVM
• Dierk König is looking forward to using Tim Yates’ groovy-stream library more
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen will be teaching web development with Groovy and Grails at the University of Southern Denmark
• Rob Fletcher points at Gdub a tool that transparently uses gradle or gradlew when available
• The Grain framework now features some stylish bootstrap based templates

Book

• Dan Woods will write a book on Ratpack for O’Reilly

Events

• Autentia becomes gold sponsor for the Greach conference
• Pronoid becomes gold sponsor of Greach
• Remember that the Call for Paper of the Greach conference is still open!
• You can buy tickets for the Greach conference now!
• The GR8Conf Europe and GR8Conf US Call for Paper is still open

Hot on the heels of our new beta for 2.4, here’s a bug fix release with Groovy 2.3.8.

You can have a look at the JIRA release and you can download Groovy 2.3.8 right away!

Thanks all for your contributions!

Keep on groovy’ing!

This is with great pleasure that we are announcing the release of Groovy 2.4.0-beta-4.

The highlights for this release are:

• a rewritten JsonBuilder for improved performance in JSON generation
• a @SelfType annotation for traits
• a new variant of GStringTemplateEngine capable of handling strings larger than 64k
• improved support for overloaded setters
• lots of bugfixes (some of which are backported in the upcoming 2.3.8 release)
• a new naming convention for closures

The last point is important if your project somehow relies on the name of the closure classes as it is a potential breaking change. The reason for the new scheme is detailed here.

My favorite read of the week is definitely Ken Kousen’s tale about Groovy’s Plain Old Groovy Object! Note the releases of the new Groovy Eclipse support and the Eclipse Maven batch compiler. Last but not least, for those of you heading to the Groovy & Grails eXchange conference in London, notice the program of the conference unfolding before your eyes!

Let me also mention the Beaker notebook project, which offers Groovy support for data scientists who want to explore their data sets. And the Spoon.net team which features Groovy support for its Windows containers.