The big news of this edition is the release of Grails 2.4, with standalone GORM and GSP, with more static compilation that even understands dynamic aspects of Grails, with a new asset pipeline, with GORM sub-queries, and with a new Maven plugin.

The other big news is that next week is the GR8Conf Europe week! So you’ll certainly see lots of nice and interesting presentations being put online next week. And I hope I’ll also be able to publish this weekly news brief in time too!

Releases keep coming, with a second RC for Grails 2.4, with Gaelyk and Griffon upgrading to Groovy 2.3, and already a bug-fix release of Groovy with version 2.3.1!

Don’t forget it’s the last week to register to the GR8Conf Europe conference!

Releases

• Second release candidate for Grails 2.4
• Guillaume Laforge announces a Groovy 2.3.1 bug-fix release
• Gaelyk 2.1.2 released, built atop Groovy 2.3.0
• Kunal Dabir released version 2.1.2 of the Gaelyk template
• Andrés Almiray is upgrading Griffon 2.0.0 beta with Groovy 2.3
• The Spud CMS engine for Grails released with new features
• The Groovy Light Table client released version 0.0.4 with further Gradle integration
• GMavenPlus 1.2 released for building your Groovy and Java projects with Maven

Interviews

• Guillaume Laforge interviewed at the JAX conference about what makes Groovy groovy, the latest 2.3 release, and roadmap

Presentations

• At the JAX conference, Guillaume Laforge presented on “what makes Groovy groovy”
• Guillaume Laforge presented the functional aspects of Groovy at the JAX conference
• A screencast showing the Gradle integration in the Light Table Groovy plugin

Articles

• Mixing Spring Boot, Groovy, Spring Batch, Grails’ GORM together
• An article summarizing the latest release of Groovy 2.3
• Grails: The Tomcat kill switch, by Michael Scharhag
• Michael Scharhag is blogging about Grails Controller namespaces
• OAuth 2.0 using Grails
• Brandon Fish explains the Grails R14 memory error on Heroku
• Alex Staveley speaks about Groovy’s “with”
• Automatically test your dirty Grails classes by Igor Shults
• Receiving emails in a Grails app by Akash Sethi

Code snippets

• Kenneth Endfinger shows a Node.js hello world written in Groovy and compiled to JavaScript with GrooScript

Tweets

• Robert Fletcher is ecstatic about Groovy’s closure coercion to “SAM” types and type inference, as this makes for very low ceremony code
• Robert Fletcher remarks that you can’t use @CompileStatic on Spock specifications, but you can on their helper methods
• Vladimir Orany updated his “Gliding Gaelyk” presentation and demo app
• Magnus Rundberget is integrating Gradle in the Groovy support for the Light Table IDE, showing an example of the Groovy Stream library
• Cédric Champeau wished that Groovy were taught more at school
• Schalk Cronjé is looking into adding Amazon S3 support to Groovy VFS
• Peter Ledbrook is wondering why the Spock testing framework doesn’t have a logo
• Guillaume Laforge shows some Spock logo ideas he proposed to Peter Niederwieser
• Dierk König notices that Java 8 features are a notable improvement when working with JavaFX, but it’s only with Groovy and GroovyFX that it is as slick
• Robert Fletcher reports a gotcha when using Spock with fields and JUnit rules
• More fun from Rob Fletcher showing how he cleverly used Groovy’s alias imports to change void into “should” in his Spock specifications
• Baruch Sadogursky happily converted a painful 300 lines of Java code using the Maven Aether library into 20 lines of Groovy code
• Cédric Champeau added “layouts” to the markup template engine in Groovy 2.3.1
• Groovy 2.3.1 is available through GVM

Code contributions

• Cédric Champeau suggests possible improvements that can be contributed by the community around the Groovy 2.3 markup template engine

News

• Grails Diary #19 by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen
• Luke Daley announces Marcin Erdmann is becoming the new project lead of the Geb project
• The Grails Diary week 20 by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen
• Geb now offers cloud browser testing with SauceLabs and BrowserStack
• Beaker, a data science laboratory with Groovy integration

Events

• Only a few days left to register to attend GR8Conf Europe!
• If you’re a student, you can get discounts for GR8Conf Europe
• There are currently 19 countries represented by the GR8Conf attendees

The Groovy development team is happy to announce the bug fix release of Groovy 2.3.1.

Lots of bugs have been reported and fixed.

Some of the highlights among those fixes:

• the classloader related problems with @Grab
• several generics handling issues
• a problem preventing Groovy from loading its modules on IBM mainframes
• a problem preventing Groovy from being loaded as an OSGi module in certain OSGi containers

You can read the JIRA release notes, and download the latest distribution.

Now that Groovy 2.3.0 is out, it’s going to be Grails turn! Graeme announced a release candidate for Grails 2.4, so take your chance to test drive it to make Grails 2.4 an awesome release!

Last but not least, you still have two weeks to buy your tickets for the GR8Conf Europe 2014!

Releases

• Graeme Rocher announces the release of Grails 2.4 RC1 with Groovy 2.3 and Spring Framework 4.0.4
• Version 0.5 of Grooscript released with Groovy 2.3 traits support
• Martin Lippert announces the release of Groovy / Grails Tool Suite 3.5.1 with support for Grails 2.3.8 and Groovy 2.3.0
• JBake 2.3.0 is out with Groovy and Thymeleaf template support
• Benjamin Muschko releases a Gradle Docker plugin using the remote API for managing images and containers
• Gretty 0.0.16 is out, the advanced Gradle plugin for running webapps on Jetty

Interviews

• InfoWorld’s Paul Krill interviewed Guillaume Laforge about the release of Groovy 2.3.0

Presentations

• Adoption of the (groovy-based) Job DSL plugin (for Jenkins) at Netflix
• Second part of the Gradle Workshop by Peter Niederwieser from the Gradle Summit 2013
• Trisha Gee demoes building a web application using Java, HTML5, Angular.js, Mongo.DB, Groovy and microservices in one hour.

Articles

• Announcement of the Groovy 2.3.0 release on the Spring.IO blog
• Gradle tip for how to attach a debugger
• An article on Groovy DSLs with the help of closures and delegates by Alex Staveley
• Spring integration testing with Spock by Jakub Kubrynski
• An update on the Groovy Light Table client

Code snippets

• Cédric Champeau shows an example of improved composition using fragments and the Markup Template Engine

Tweets

• Video of the Groovy Podcast episode 1 by Peter Ledbrook
• Peter Ledbrook also published the audio of the Groovy podcast
• The interviews recorded at Greach 2014 are now subtitled
• Rob Fletcher calls to action to vote for the traits support in IntelliJ IDEA

Mailing-lists discussions

• The Grails mailing-lists from Codehaus are closing, announced Jeff Brown. Technical questions will be headed to StackOverflow, whereas a dedicated Google Group is being created for general discussions and announcements

Google+ Posts

• Ryan Vanderwerf shares a little preview of the “Getting Groovy with Lego Mindstorms EV3” workshop at the upcoming GR8Conf Europe 2014

News

• You can try GrooScript online to convert your Groovy code to JavaScript
• Robert Fisher proposes the Gradle License plugin to generate a report of the licenses of the dependencies used in your project

Jobs

• A startup in Paris, France, is looking for a Grails developer

Events

• The SpringOne2GX 2014 conference in Dallas has published most of its agenda
• Two weeks left to get your GR8Conf Europe ticket!
• Meet the GR8Conf Europe team

Tthe big news of the week is the release of Groovy 2.3.0! With traits, support for running on JDK 8, new AST transformations, lightning fast JSON support, and more!

Be sure to read the Groovy 2.3.0 release notes to get all the juicy details!

And vote up the DZone link to make a bit of buzz on the small interview of Guillaume Laforge about the release.

Also, Hubert Klein Ikking was on a blogging spree, as he wrote many new items in the Groovy Goodness series with snippets showing the new features in action. So don’t miss those examples linked below!

The Groovy development team is proud to announce the final release of Groovy 2.3.0!

Groovy 2.3 is the new major release of Groovy, featuring official support for running Groovy on JDK 8, traits, new and improved AST transformations like @TailRecursive, @Builder and @Sortable, a new NIO2 module with Path support, lightening fast JSON parsing and building, closure parameter type inference, a new markup template engine, Groovysh and GroovyConsole ease of use improvements, a new GroovyAssert test utility, more @BaseScript class capabilities, and more.

To celebrate the International Workers’ Day (a holiday in half of the world’s countries, no less! including mine), we’re announcing the release of Groovy 2.3.0-RC-4.

Yes, RC-4 and not RC-3, as we’re still having some issues with our build and deployment infrastructure which made us have to skip a bit.

Thanks to your feedback, we managed to iron out some more issues and regressions we were having with the tricky generics handling.

Another busy week for the Groovy ecosystem, with key releases of Groovy, Grails, Gradle, GPars, and CodeNarc! This can be labeled as a “release week”!

Releases

• Guillaume Laforge announces the release candidate of Groovy 2.3
• Guillaume Laforge announces the second release candidate of Groovy 2.3
• Graeme Rocher announces a Grails joint release with Grails 2.3.8 and Grails 2.4-milestone-2
• Gradle 1.12 released with some nice universal performance improvements, more control of the dependency resolution process, an improved API for IDE integration, Clang and CUnit support for native code and a slew of bug and compatibility fixes
• Release of GORM for MongoDB v3.0 with MongoDB 2.6 support (new GeoJSON types, text search)
• The CodeNarc static code analysis tool for Groovy releases CodeNarc version 0.21, with 15 new rules
• GPars 1.2 has been released

Presentations

• Jorge Franco presents GrooScript, the Groovy to JavaScript compiler, at Greach 2014
• Cédric Champeau gave an excellent workshop at Greach 2014 entitled “unleashing the power of AST transformations”
• Cédric Champeau and Fabrice Matrat present about “Groovy, head in the cloud”, at Greach 2014, where they show how to secure Groovy code in a cloud and shared environment
• Rick Hightower created a presentation on Java JSON parser benchmarking, upon his work on the Groovy and Boon parsers performance work
• Grails workshop given at Greach 2014 by Fernando Redondon

Articles

• MrHaki writes about restricting script syntax with SecureASTCustomizer
• MrHaki defines compilation customizers with the builder syntax
• MrHaki explains how to customize the @ToString transform
• Using Spock configuration with Grails
• Julien Ponge comes back on Andrey Bloschetsov and Rick Hightower JSON benchmarks, with a few updates to improve the reliability of the benchmarks. Boon is underlying the new JSON capabilities of Groovy 2.3 while the Groovy represented in this article refers to the pre-Groovy 2.3 parser and serializer.

Tweets

• Cédric Champeau is teasing about his work on Groovy support for Android
• Graeme Rocher shows the compelling conciseness and readability of GORM vs raw Hibernate
• The GR8Conf Europe team is looking for a name for its last special conference beer brew, if you’ve got suggestions
• Groovy 2.3-rc-1 available through GVM
• Gradle 1.12-rc-2 is available through GVM
• Grails 2.3.8 and 2.4.0-milestone-2 now available for download on GVM
• Dan Allen mentions that a Google Summer of Code student will be working on a Groovy scripting frontend for Arquillian
• Peter Ledbrook, scratching his head, points at the first Grails podcast episode in video form
• Peter Ledbrook published an MP3 version of the Grails podcast in addition to the video stream
• Alex Sanchez remarks that lots of Java developers are getting acquainted with Groovy thanks to Gradle and Spock
• Bertrand Goetzmann notes that Grails also has a “wrapper” like Gradle to ease having everybody on the team run the very same version of Grails
• Looking at the Groovy meta-programming documentation reminds us how awesome Groovy is!

Code Snippets

• How to use Grails’ GSP view technology in Spring Boot

News

• Netflix is well known for its heavy use of Groovy, Grails and Gradle for their infrastructure, and they are sharing project Nebula, a platform for handling and sharing Gradle plugins

Events

• Object Partners become a sponsor of GR8Conf Europe 2014
• The GR8Conf Europe crew is brewing the official conference beverage
• The agenda of GR8Conf Europe 2014 has been posted

The Groovy team is happy to announce the release of Groovy 2.3.0-rc-2. This should be the last release candidate until the final release in a couple days.

This release ironed out a few bugs, for instance in generics handling, or made the groovydoc tool aware of traits.

Note that the latest fixes in the traits support introduce a binary incompatibility compared to the previous release candidate.

You can have a look at the JIRA release notes: https://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&version=20357

The Groovy team is happy to announce the first release candidate of Groovy 2.3!

The major changes between this version and the last beta include:

• a simplification of the semantics of traits, by removing @ForceOverride and making it the default
• the implementation of stackable traits for improved composition of behavior
• a new @Builder AST transformation to generate builders for immutable classes
• bug fixes on generics type inference

For more details on the changes in this version, please refer to the JIRA release notes.