The Easter bunny is delivering the latest Groovy Weekly column!

With your chocolate eggs, you’ll get some bits of functional programming, a tutorial on Groovy traits, details of the JSON serialization performance improvements, and also get the chance of voicing your feedback on things like Groovy’s support of Java 8 lambda syntax, on the Ratpack async support, and more.

Releases

• groovy-comprehension is a groovy extension module / AST transformation which provides simple list comprehension functionality similar to that of Haskell, Scala or Python. Under the hood it’s a ‘monad’ comprehension but you don’t care about it for use.

Presentations

• Guillaume Laforge gave a brand new presentation on Groovy, at Devoxx France 2014, covering the novelties in the upcoming Groovy 2.3 release
• Cédric Champeau spoke about Gradle vs Maven at the Devoxx France 2014 conference last week. The slides are in French, but even if you’re not speaking it, you should get some interesting tidbits from the code samples and links

Articles

• Andrey Bloschetsov published follow up benchmarks after Rick’s on the JSON performance improvements, this time for the serialization of JSON payloads
• A tutorial on Groovy traits by Michael Scharhag
• Kyle Boon on the state of code coverage for Groovy
• Marcin Gryszko’s quest for persistable Groovy immutability
• Ken Kousen on the “closure of no return”, on the fact you can “return” from the outer scope of the closure you pass to an each or findAll method
• Ken Kousen received some excellent feedback on his article “the closure of no return” showing the way towards the solution and best approaches
• Grails design best practices by Nitin Kumar
• MrHaki on extending the Grails IntegrateWith Command

Tweets

• Should Groovy support the Java 8 lambda syntax? Your opinion is interesting.
• The Ratpack team is looking for feedback on their async support
• Cédric Champeau advises developers to always use the Gradle wrapper, in particular within OSS projects, as it makes it easier to have a consistent build experience among developers and new contributors
• Schalk Cronjé is playing around with Greyton, a Groovy DSL (on top of JClouds) to simplify cloud devops and is looking for feedback
• Schalk Cronjé is looking for volunteers to try the SMB / CIFS provider for his Groovy VFS library
• Dierk König shares a handy Groovy one-liner to print your local IP address from the command-line
• Dan Woods fell into the trap of using GStrings as keys for maps, and the follow up discussion on Twitter on the topic is worth a read
• Russ Miles finds Groovy elegant and simple for using nested data structures, adding to Spring Boot’s productivity too

Google+ posts

• Monadic combinators in Groovy by Mark Perry

News

• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen on the Grails Diary #16
• Glu is now hosting its binary release thanks to Bintray

Books

• The Grails Goodness book has been published by MrHaki

Jobs

• James Foley is currently looking to network with an experienced (3 years plus) Groovy/Grails Application Developer for an excellent on going contract OR contract to hire scenario. 100% Remote opportunity!

Events

• The SpringOne2GX 2014 conference in Dallas is now open for registration, with a super early bird price
• And of course, GR8Conf Europe and US 2014 are still open for registration too!

Busy conference times:

Greach is over, but we’re lucky to get the next batch of presentations and videos online on the Greach Youtube channel.

The GR8Conf Europe early bird price has been extended for another week.

And Cédric and myself (Guillaume) are heading to the Devoxx France conference to speak about Groovy and Gradle.

While at the same time, the Groovy team is delivering a new beta for the lovely Groovy 2.3 release.

Hot on the heels of our first beta for Groovy 2.3, here’s already a second one!

We’ve received a lot of feedback, which is really awesome! Thanks a lot to all those who put the first beta to its pace and reported their findings.

The most important change in this release is that the groovy.jar no longer depends on ASM and Antlr.

It’s the first release ever of Groovy where the groovy.jar itself is jajar-ed like the groovy-all JAR, which means that the ASM and Antlr libraries are embeded (and translated to a different package) so that you don’t need to depend on those libraries in your projects, and run the risk of a version clash with other frameworks or libraries depending on differing versions.

After the Groovy knights in Madrid, at the Greach conference, the Groovy team delivers the first beta of Groovy 2.3!

An impressive feature list: including traits, official JDK 8 support, tail recursion, NIO2 module, super fast JSON support, closure type inference, a new markup template engine, and much more.

You will also notice the new documentation shaping up but the Groovy Core team still looks forward to contributions to help with this gigantic task, so don’t hesitate to voice your will to help!

The Groovy team is very pleased to announce the first beta of the Groovy 2.3 release!

Groovy 2.3.0-beta-1 is actually already a feature-complete beta, so the release cycle towards the final version will be very short. Furthermore, Grails 2.4 is looking forward to integrating it rapidly as well for its upcoming major release too! So you can expect a general availability version of Groovy in the coming weeks, as we’ll move directly in “release candidate” mode after this beta. But your feedback, as usual, will be very important for trying out this beta in your respective projects, to tell us about any problem you might encounter.

Although it’s April Fools day, I’ll spare you with some funny incredible surprise, but I will instead focus a lot on all the great, interesting and inspiring things that happened at the Greach 2014 conference, in Spain, Madrid. Also don’t miss the various links about the incoming support of traits in Groovy 2.3!

Releases

• Spring Boot 1.0 released, with its nice Groovy support
• Ratpack 0.9.3 released
• Glide 0.3.2 released, with latest Gaelyk 2.1.1 and Google App Engine 1.9.1 into the mix
• A new version of the GVM SDK was released
• The completely Groovy Continuous Integration Server, SimpleCI, is now stable, and is on a rolling release cycle
• Sergei Egorov shares his MacroGroovy project, to simplify the creation of AST transformations

Presentations

• Guillaume Laforge presented the present and future of Groovy at Greach 2014
• Metaprogramming with Groovy, presentation by Iván López at Greach 2014
• Jeff Beck presented his experience about using Grails in microservice architecture, at Greach 2014
• Marco Vermeulen demonstrated BDD with Cucumber and Groovy at Greach 2014
• The slides and code from Greach 2014 of Marco Vermeulen’s Micro Services with Spring Boot and Groovy
• A very funny but highly interesting presentation from Burt Beckwith, given at Greach 2014, about the worst Grails practices
• Burt Beckwith detailed the novelties in Grails spring-security-core 2.0, in this Greach 2014 presentation
• Slides and code from Russel Winder’s Greach 2014 presentation on Groovy, GPars, @CompileStatic, “invoke dynamic” and Java 8
• At Greach 2014, Alonso Torres presented “understanding GORM”
• Steve Pember presented on reactive architectures at Greach 2014
• Schalk Cronjé talked about Groovy VFS at Greach 2014
• An intro presentation of Groovy and Grails by the “Gr8 ladies” of Minneapolis

Articles

• Cédric Champeau is listening for feedback on the upcoming Groovy 2.3 traits implementation, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts! (the included snippets are not displayed but can be found in the sources)
• Brendon Anderson on a Groovy time with UPnP and WeMo
• MrHaki shows how to deal with multiple Grails bootstraps
• During his presentation at Greach 2014, Burt Beckwith mentioned a blog post about hash password conversion he wrote
• David Estes shows how to dynamically find views in Grails
• Some first impressions on using Grails with Angular.JS

Code snippets

• Cédric Champeau shows how he replaced @Mixin with the upcoming traits from Groovy 2.3
• Examples of Groovy 2.3 runtime traits support by Cédric Champeau
• A Ratpack 0.9.3 example by Russell Hart, showing authentication at work with the pac4j module

Tweets

• Cédric Champeau notes that GrooScript (the Groovy to JavaScript “transpiler”) would deserve more attention!
• If you want to contribute to Ratpack, here’s the list of contributions you can make
• Alonso Torres remarks the lack of Scalability talks about Grails at conferences… probably because Grails just scales :-)
• A big zoom of Cédric Champeau and Guillaume Laforge on the funny Groovy knights panel at Greach 2014

Other news

• GVM welcomes Glide as a new “candidate”

Jobs

• A Groovy / Grails / Cassandra job in Paris, France
• Biotech startup in Boston looking for a Grails developer

Events

• Who wants to be made a Groovy knight? A nice panel where to put your heads was in the hallways of Greach 2014
• Yeray Darias Camacho took several notes on the presentations given at Greach 2014, and published them on flickr
• Schalk Cronjé drawed many little graphical notes about the sessions he attended at the Greach 2014 conference
• A new Groovy/Grails user group in San Diego has launched by Vahid Pazirandeh

This week is a Spanish week! The Groovy community is moving towards Madrid (Spain) for the Greach conference, to talk about Groovy, Grails, Gradle, Spock, GrooScript, GPars, Gaelyk and more! Enjoy the conference, for the lucky ones attending, and otherwise, have fun reading the news below.

Releases

• Gaelyk 2.1 has been released
• There’s a Gradle plugin for the Grain static website generator, for generating your site from your build
• Nextflow, a DSL for data-driven computational pipelines, based on Groovy and GPars, released in version 0.7
• Marco Vermeulen releases version 0.5.1 of the Gradle Spawn plugin, for starting and stopping UNIX command line processes from within your build
• MongoDB GORM 2.0 plugin released

Articles

• An old question on Quora about whether “Groovy is going away” is re-surfacing from time to time, and Rob Fletcher recently gave a new answer for that question.
• MrHaki is showing how to use Groovy SQL in Grails
• Angel Ruiz writes about the Grails 2.2 to 2.3 migration
• Alexander Reelsen believes Spark, Groovy and JRebel make for a productive combination
• A paper in German on using Grails for a portal framework
• Libgdx, a Java based game framework, is migrating to Gradle

Code snippets

• Cédric Champeau has created a Groovy solver for the 2048 game, showing a nice use of Geb usage
• An example of broadcasting with websockets and Ratpack

Tweets

• Dierk König says it’s at the same time nice and weird to see Java developers now being able to enjoy the benefits that Groovy has provided for the past 10 years already
• Replying to Rob Fletcher about the fact that the lambda syntax from Java 8 was differing in syntax from Groovy, Neill Robbins was saying that he prefers the legibility of Groovy’s closures. What’s your opinion?
• Jeff Brown is working on Grails with Groovy AST transforms and type checking extensions and finds that it makes Groovy a very powerful programming tool
• Dierk König remarks that Groovy can be at the same time provide more static checks than Java, but also be way more dynamic
• Matt Stine shares a nice scaling demo app for Cloud Foundry using Spring Boot and Groovy

Google+ posts

• Richard Vowles notes that with the latest IntelliJ IDEA 13.1 release, for your projects using the Maven Eclipse Groovy compiler, there’s no need anymore for the Eclipse Groovy plugin, as IDEA recognizes the Maven layout properly now out of the box.

Other news

• Grails Diary week #12 by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen

Books

• Book Review: Programming Groovy 2 Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer

Events

• Some of the names of the speakers of GR8Conf Europe 2014
• The Call for Papers of the SpringOne2GX 2014 conference will end on April 30th
• The GR8Conf US 2014 tickets are now on sale, and you can get door buster tickets the following two weeks

Hot on the heels of the Java 8 general availability good news, let’s have a look at the latest news of our beloved Groovy community!

Releases

• Keegan Witt announces the first enhancement release of GMavenPlus
• Marco Vermeulen updates GVM SDK to 0.5.4
• Andrés Almiray releases version 1.0 of his Gradle quickstart lazybones template

Articles

• Jenn Strater speaks about the Gr8Ladies mission
• Dan Woods explores Spring Boot for micro-services and also shows the Groovy support with Spring Boot CLI
• Tomás Lin’s notes on Spring Boot, Websockets, StompJS and AngularJS
• Tomás Lin details how to build web content JARs for Spring Boot with Gradle
• Michael Scharhag shows how you can benefit from Groovysh
• Tim Yates details the progress and Java 8 support of the Groovy Stream library
• Alex Staveley writes about the good use of closures
• MrHaki explains how to use Hibernate native SQL queries in Grails
• Matt Cholick shows how to use Gradle to build and apply AST transformations
• MrHaki covers how to combine Grails constraints with shared constraints
• An update on Griffon’s simple-jpa plugin
• A sample Griffon application with the simple-jpa plugin
• Using Grails REST for authentication in an Angular.JS single page application
• Mark Reinhold while mentioning those who contributed to the Java 8 release thanks our very own Cédric Champeau from the Groovy project for his useful bug reports for Java 8
• Vivek Garg explains how to integrate Tumblr within Grails applications
• Uday Pratap Singh shows how to apply layout to template at runtime in Grails applications

Presentations

• Baruch Sadogursky discusses creating DSLs which support plugins written both in Groovy or Java, addressing good public API design practices, security, and classpath isolation. Presentation given at SpringOne2GX 2013

Code snippets

• Cédric Champeau created a solver for the addictive 2048 game using Geb and Groovy
• Tim Yates plays with the RxJava’s Groovy support

Tweets

• A handful of door busters tickets for GR8Conf Europe 2014 are still available
• MrHaki, alias Hubert Klein Hikkink, is starting work on a Grails goodness book
• André Steingreß noticed how light the documentation related to Ratpack’s Groovy support is… perhaps it’s time to help and contribute?
• Tip on how to set headers for a url.text Groovy call
• If you want to learn more about Gaelyk’s developments from Gaelyk’s lead developer Vladimír Oraný’s own mouth, don’t miss this session from the Greach conference
• Sébastien Blanc shows a screenshot of a Grails backend using AeroGear unified push server

Other news

• First speakers of the GR8Conf Europe 2014 event are being announced
• Jacob Aee Mikkelsen’s weekly Grails diary
• I forgot to mention the previous week Grails diary in my latest Groovy Weekly column

Books

• You can support Hubert Klein Ikkink’s Groovy and Grails goodness efforts by buying the Groovy goodness book
• Orest Ivasiv reviews Ken Kousen’s “Making Java Groovy” book

Events

• A GR8Ladies meetup in Minneapolis, MN (USA) on March 21st
• The GR8Ladies will be at Women Techmakers, in Minneapolis, on March 22nd
• The Call for Papers of the SpringOne2GX 2014 conference will end on April 30th
• The Greach conference is offering 23 books and 27 ebooks to win for the attendees
• Gradleware reminds that *you* could be a presenter at the Gradle Summit 2014!
• Hubert Klein Ikkink (alias MrHaki) will be presenting a getting started Grails university session for the NLJUG on March 25th

What can I tell you for this twelveth week? The Groovy ecosystem is still looking for students for the Google Summer of Code program, so if you know students that could be interested, please pass the message. Also notice the nice release train of Grails with its recent 2.2 / 2.3 / 2.4 releases, congrats to the team!

Releases

• Grails 2.3.7 release
• Grain 0.6 released
• Noam Tenne releases a Java API on top of GVM’s API
• Andrés Almiray releases Gipsy 0.4 (Service Provider Interface simplification)
• Schalk Cronjé releases v0.4 of his Groovy VFS library (Virtual File System)
• GVM’s SDK jumps to version 0.5.2

Articles

• Marco Vermeulen blogs about the GVM Software Development Kit
• David Estes introduces Karman, a standardized, multi-provider, easy-to-use, Grails based storage interface, currently only supporting Amazon S3 but that should end up supporting also Rackspace CDN or Google Cloud Storage
• What is Groovy? is the first article of the upcoming series encouraging programmers to start writing their applications in Groovy. This particular article provides a basic background of Groovy and a number of code snippets proving its supremacy over Java.
• Creating paginated archives in Grain
• Creating a custom website or theme with Grain
• Tim Yates is enhancing his Groovy Stream library with some further Java 8 lambda support

Presentations

• If you speak Spanish, you might be interested in having a look at the recordings of past Madrid GGUG meetups

Code snippets

• Mixing Spring Boot and Ratpack

Tweets

• Ratpack is introducing the beginnings of integration with Newrelic for monitoring and tracing
• A GVM SDK library for consumption of the GVM API
• Grails 2.2.5 is available on GVM
• Grails 2.3.7 is available through GVM
• Grails 2.4 milestone 1 is available on GVM

Other news

• Cédric Champeau updates its ongoing “traits” implementation for Groovy 2.3 with trait inheritance support. Don’t hesitate to try that and report back your findings!
• A project providing command line access to Virgo container using Groovy
• Gretty, an advanced Gradle plugin for running web-apps on Jetty
• Cédric Champeau posted beta documentation for the new Markup template engine for Groovy

Books

• The Gradle in Action print book is 43% off till March 20th with a special promo code
• Lieven Doclo reviews the Gradle in Action book

Events

• A GR8Ladies meetup in Minneapolis, MN (USA) on March 21st
• The Call for Papers of the SpringOne2GX 2014 conference will end on April 30th
• The Greach conference is offering 23 books and 27 ebooks to win for the attendees
• Gradleware reminds that *you* could be a presenter at the Gradle Summit 2014!
• Hubert Klein Ikkink (alias MrHaki) will be presenting a getting started Grails university session for the NLJUG on March 25th
• The GR8Ladies will be at Women Techmakers, in Minneapolis, on March 22nd
• If you’re in the Sacremento area, the SacGRU Groovy/Grails user group is meeting every first Thursday of each month at 18:30
• For those in the Dallas / Fort Worth area, you can attend the DFW Groovy/Grails user group on every first Wednesday of each month

This is a bit of a special day for me today, as it’s my first daughter’s birthday, who just reached 6, a much younger age than my 10 years involvement in Groovy! And after eating a home-made vanilla French yogurt birthday cake, I’m happy to share with you the following news bits, in particular the nice releases of Groovy 2.2.2, of the first milestone of Grails 2.4, as well as of Ratpack 0.9.2.