The Groovy development team is happy to announce the release of a third beta for Groovy 2.4.

This release contains various bug fixes and minor improvements.

I’ll highlight the fact that you can now use multiple labels on your statements (instead of just one).

With beta-3 now, many of the unneeded synthetic methods generated by Groovy are not generated anymore, reducing the number of methods nicely yielding smaller bytecode. This is of particular interest for Android developers limited in the overall number of methods used in Android applications.

After a long summer break, it’s high time we resume Groovy Weekly, and come back to our every-Tuesday agenda! Get ready for lots of content!

If there were one particular item of news I’d like to highlight in this edition, that’s the news about the New York Times that is going to use Groovy and its Android support (in the upcoming Groovy 2.4), as well as RxJava, to revamp its Android application to make more “reactive”.

On the Groovy mailing-list, we had an interesting question about how to disable annotations like @Grab, to prevent users from downloading third-party dependencies. There are a few possibilities for that, but my favorite was to create a global AST transformation that would generate a compilation error if the @Grab annotation is found on an import.

I created a first small prototype within a script, but I used an injected local transformation to get everything working with a simple script. So I decided afterwards to do it for real this time, using a real project on Github with a proper global AST transformation this time.

You probably remember Groovy and Gradle being selected in RebelLabs’ report as part of the 10 “kick-ass” technologies developers love? But I’m also happy to report that Groovy won the Geek Choice Award, showing how groovy Groovy is!

GR8Conf US 2014 last week is delivering tons of great videos and materials from all the speakers that came to the conference, and I hope you’ll find time to watch a few. My personal highlight was the great Q&A talk by Scott Hickey and Jim McGill on looking back into 9 years of using Groovy at a big US insurance company. Don’t miss it!

RebelLabs launched an annual study and awards to select 10 “kick-ass” technologies that developers love, and both Gradle and Groovy were among the winners!

You can learn more about this “kick-ass” technology study in the PDF report they crafted and which can be downloaded there (form filing required to download the PDF).

Details are available for:

• Groovy
• Gradle

It’s always nice to see such reports and awards recognizing the great work and energy the Groovy and Gradle teams have been put into developing those technologies, and making developers around the world delighted to work with them.

Live from GR8Conf US 2014, in Minneapolis, MN, USA! The code samples and slides of presentations are already flowing and are listed below in the presentations section. Lots of great content and talks to learn from.

Releases

• Andrés Almiray released Griffon 2.0.0-rc-1 live on stage at GR8Conf US 2014, along with the announcement of the new Griffon website
• Cédric Champeau announces the releases of Groovy 2.3.6 and Groovy 2.4.0-beta-2
• Guillaume Laforge announced Groovy 2.3.5 with upward compatibility
• Cédric Champeau released v0.3.0 of the Gradle Groovy Android plugin, allowing you to support Android libraries
• Cédric Champeau announces v0.1.2 of the JMH Gradle plugin
• Kunal Dabir released Glide 0.3.3, with upgraded dependencies, and more goodness for Windows
• Cédric Champeau releases a Japicmp Gradle plugin to compare binary compatibility between JAR binaries
• Gradle Shadow plugin 1.0.3 released

News

• ElasticSearch using Groovy scripting by default
• The new Griffon website is online!
• Dan Woods is contributing an Apache Camel module for Ratpack
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen published Grails Diary, week 30

Articles

• Ryan Vanderwerf on getting started with programming with Groovy on Lego Mindstorms EV3
• Andrés Almiray’s Gradle Glam: JaCoCo + CoverAlls
• NullObject pattern implementation in Groovy, a map with default behavior, by Marcin Zajączkowski
• John Ferguson Smart wrote about data-driven testing with JUnit and highlighting Spock’s data-driven approach
• Guide showing how to use Grails’ REST support from GSPs using GrooScript
• Craig Burke writes about Grails, Angular.JS and the Asset pipeline
• Andrés Almiray shows how to test JavaFX services, the Griffon way
• Juan Vazquez wrote about adding map / filter / reduce method aliases with a Groovy extension module
• André Steingreß explained how to create your own Groovy type checking extensions
• WebSocket support with GrooScript within Grails applications
• Email tracking with MailGun in a Grails application
• Jsoup for the Grails soul
• A Gradle tutorial series
• Gradle Tutorial: Part 1 — Installation + Setup
• Gradle Tutorial: Part 2 — Java Projects
• Gradle Tutorial: Part 3 — Multiple Java Projects
• InfoQ on ElasticSearch using Groovy for scripting

Presentations

• Cédric Champeau demonstrates the Groovy support for developing Android applications
• Jeff Beck published his GR8Conf US 2014 Ratpack intro presentation and code
• Colin Harrington published his GR8Conf US 2014 presentation slides on how to test your Grails application
• Colin Harrington on functional testing your Grails apps with Geb, at GR8Conf US 2014
• Ryan Vanderwerf on getting Grails / Groovy into the enterprise, at GR8Conf US 2014
• Ted Naleid on using the Grails Asset pipeline, presented at GR8Conf US 2014
• Performance tuning Grails applications by Lari Hotari at GR8Conf US 2014
• Fine-grained security by Andy Miller at GR8Conf US 2014
• Grails 3 and Ratpack, Micro-services, and more, by Lari Hotari, at GR8Conf US 2014
• GR8Conf US 2014 slides and samples are being collected on Github

Mailing-list posts

• Interesting thread on the Groovy user list about Groovy performance, advocating Groovy vs Java, and more

Tweets

• How Target is embracing Groovy
• Highlight.js now supports Groovy syntax highlighting
• Guillaume Laforge contributed a Groovy logo for the devicons font
• Vert.x 2.1.2 is available through GVM
• Angel Ruiz likes Java 8 streams but loves Tim Yates’ Groovy streams even more
• Glide 0.3.3 available through GVM
• Groovy 2.3.5 available through GVM
• Jeff Beck suggests to use GVM and Lazybones for getting started with Ratpack
• A new Groovy-related account to follow on Twitter with Groovy puzzlers
• Ken Kousen showed the nice Grails url-mapping-reports command on stage
• Rob Fletcher claims Ratpack is your gateway drug to non-blocking
• Thanks to the GR8Ladies work, we’re seeing more women participating to GR8Conf
• Scott Hickey is still impressed, amazed and appreciative of the Groovy community after 9 years of using Groovy in various enterprise projects

Code snippets

• Andrés Almiray shows how to aggregate JaCoCo reports in a multi-project Gradle build
• Luke Daley adds test support for async support in Ratpack
• Andrey Hihlovskiy shows a snippet removing parts of a string with regular expressions
• Cédric Champeau shows an example usage of the Groovy Android Gradle plugin with an Android library
• MrHaki’s GR8Conf US 2014 G* Goodness talks’ samples:
  • code samples of his Gradle Goodness presentation
  • code samples of his Grails Goodness presentation
  • code samples of his Groovy Goodness presentation
• Erik Pragt shares a snippet of code showing exceptions implementing a no-stacktrace trait to make exceptions fast and cheap

Books

• Grails in Action, 2nd edition, is available in epub and kindle formats

Events

• Early bird for SpringOne2GX is ending on August 9th

Jobs

• Target is hiring Groovy developers

The Groovy team is pleased to announce the release of Groovy 2.3.5.

Groovy 2.3.5 is a bug fix release of our Groovy 2.3 branch.

You’ll find fixes for static compilation and type-checking, JSON serialization issues, markup template engine errors, and performance improvements.

We care a lot about backward and binary compatibility, but in this release, we also thought about upward compatibility, so that code compiled with a newer version can even run on an older runtime.

The news keep flowing even in the summer!

It’s probably not new to you, my readers, but Groovy and Grails are kick-ass technologies, as reported by the RebelLabs report.

And did you know that Groovy is now the default scripting technology in the popular ElasticSearch? Or used by Jenkins in its Job DSL?

We even have rumors, with the potential acquisition of Groovy-powered SmartThings IoT platform by Samsung!

We also have more videos available of presentations from GR8Conf Europe, to prepare yourself for those who are attending GR8Conf US next week! See you there!

The new Groovy website announced last week keeps on improving, thanks to your feedback and already many contributions through pull requests on Github!

To wet your appetite for GR8Conf US 2014 at the end of the month, we also have more GR8Conf Europe 2014 videos published last week!

Releases

• Groovy Grails ToolSuite 3.6.0 out with Groovy 2.3 and Grails 2.4 support on Eclipse 4.4
• GrooScript 0.5.2 is out
• The Windows installer for Groovy 2.3.4 is available thanks to Joachim Baumann
• Andrés Almiray released the Asciidoctor Gradle plugin v0.7.3 which is compatible with JDK 6+

News

• Kunal Dabir created an “awesome-groovy” Github project providing a curated list of interesting Groovy-based projects

Articles

• Benjamin Muschko explains why build your Java projects with Gradle rather than Ant or Maven
• Guillaume Laforge gathered the feedback the team received about the new Groovy website
• Roberto Guerra writes about Ratpack’s templates
• Use Gradle to switch a dependency from binary to source mode and back, by Sven Ehrke
• Grails Goodness by MrHaki
  • change response formats in RestfulController
  • custom controller class with resource Annotation
  • using converter named configurations with default renderers
• Pawel Oczadly reveals a Gradle tip: set a different name for wrapper and the default build script

Presentations — GR8Conf Europe 2014

• Noam Tenne delivered a fantastic Groovy puzzler talk
• Graeme Rocher talks about Grails 3 and beyond
• Andrés Almiray on what’s new and coming in Griffon
• Lari Hotari on Grails 3 and Ratpack
• Peter Ledbrook guides you through bootstrapping your projects with Lazybones
• Jeff Brown shows you how you can do polyglot web development with Grails 2

Mailing-list posts

• Dylan Bijnagte announces Spock-Genesis: data generators for data-driven / property based testing with Spock

Google+ posts

• LinYuan Zheng launched an effort to translate the Groovy documentation in Chinese

Tweets

• Marco Vermeulen is looking for a PaaS sponsor to host GVM
• Dan Woods measured Ratpack’s great stable performance at 52K requests/second on a large Amazon EC2 instance
• Cédric Champeau notices that in a matter of hours, the new Groovy website project on Github received 3 pull requests
• As noted by Vladimír Oraný, the “improve the doc” button on the new Groovy web site makes it easy to contribute improvements to the site
• Andrés Almiray choses JBake and Asciidoctor for the upcoming Griffon 2.0 website
• Guillaume Laforge mentions a dozen pull requests in a day following the announcement of the beta version of the new Groovy website
• Cédric Champeau published an updated Android GR8Conf agenda application built with Groovy for GR8Conf US 2014
• Cédric Champeau and Robert Fletcher contrast Groovy traits and Java 8 default methods
• The Gr8Ladies website received a nice facelift
• Ratpack 0.9.7 will integrate with the Gradle Shadow plugin for fat-jar-ing Ratpack apps
• Eric MacAdie is using Groovy Validator on immutable objects

Code snippets

• Alexander Klein is exploring Groovy builders for Android
• Roberto Guerra shows to authenticate with via Google OAuth for your Ratpack applications

Books

• Glen Smith is proud to have the Grails in Action 2nd edition book in his hands for real
• Grails in Action 2nd edition is now available in print

In this post, I’ll sum up the feedback we’ve gathered through the mailing-lists, Twitter, Google+, blog comments, Github issues, regarding the release of the beta of the new Groovy website.

Overall, so far, the feedback has been very positive, and people are very excited about the fresher and more modern look of the website, as well as happy to find relevant information more easily in a couple of clicks.

But like anything, there are various aspects we can improve! Some ideas exposed below were already elements we already had on our roadmap, or on the back-burner as nice-to-have’s, but it’s worth sharing them here and comment on them.