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.

This week, coming back from the Devoxx conference in Belgium, I’ve gathered a bag of Groovy news for your consumption, for our usual Tuesday Groovy Weekly release!

No particular big highlight today, but perhaps just a happy birthday to GrooScript, the Groovy to JavaScript transpiler, and also notice the opening of the Call for Paper for the GR8Conf conferences in Europe and in the United States.

Releases

• Gradle 2.2.1-rc-1 released

Articles

• Luke Daley explains Ratpack’s execution model in practice
• Custom collections in Groovy by Marcin Gryszko
• MrHaki’s Gradle Goodness: Check task dependencies with a dry run
• Dan Tanner wrote about the differences between Groovy’s collect and spread-dot operator
• Displaying all dependencies for all subprojects in a multi-project Gradle build
• String templates in Groovy by Mike Hostetler
• Craig Burke writes the first article of a series about the Angular.JS Grails template

Presentations

• Devoxx special
  • Guillaume Laforge presented “Groovy in the light of Java 8”
  • Guillaume Laforge presented “Groovy in 2014 and beyond”
  • Cédric Champeau presented “Groovy and Android, the winning pair”
• Jérôme Louvel from the Restlet and APISpark projects mentions a PayPal API platform presentation showing Groovy being used for API composition

Mailing-lists

• New versions of the Groovy Eclipse compiler are coming along

News

• An update of GroovyBlogs with infinite loading of recent and popular blog posts
• Andrés Almiray found this old gem in honor of Dick Wall from the Javaposse fame as the podcast comes to its end, showing Dick loving the Groovy
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 46

Tweets

• GrooScript celebrates 2 years since the 0.1 release!
• Lari Hotari is working on Grails 3 / Spring Boot startup time optimisations
• Patrick Double published a Grails plugin to improve Grails / SauceLabs Geb integration
• GrooScript chat application deployed on Heroku with Node.JS and Socket.IO
• Ratpack features a URL builder utility
• Hans Dockter showed declarative dependency replacement with Gradle at Devoxx 2014
• Hans Dockter showed how to tell Gradle that you don’t want to depend on beta dependencies
• Gradle 2.2.1-rc-1 available on GVM
• Álvaro Sánchez sparks a discussion about Spock labels indentation on twitter

Code snippets

• Cédric Champeau is working on AST tree matching
• Vladimir Orany shares a snippet showing how to enable DSL support in IntelliJ IDEA

Events

• The Call for Paper for GR8Conf Europe and GR8Conf US is open

Today is the celebration of the veteran day / remembrance day in various countries throughout the world. So I’ll start with a big thank you to our ancestors who fought for our freedom!

This week is also a busy week as a part of the Groovy core team is moving to Antwerpen in Belgium to speak about Groovy at the Devoxx conference.

My picks of the week, among the news below are: the release of Gradle 2.2, the release of ElasticSearch 1.4 which now standardizes on Groovy for its default scripting language, and the announcement of the dates of the Greach conference in Spain and its call for paper which is open.

This week, an InfoWorld article lists Groovy among the 9 cutting-edge programming language worth learning today, although it reduces Groovy to a mere Java dynamic scripting language. Are you happy with the investment you made into learning Groovy a while ago?

We also have some nice releases, like the monthly Ratpack release, or the 1.0 versions of GroovyServ (for starting up your Groovy scripts at light speed), and Gaiden for making nice documentation with Markdown.

Isn’t it a mythical number? The 42nd edition of Groovy Weekly! Will we get the answer to life the universe and everything?

At least, we have a nice list of releases, this week, in particular with Grails 2.4.4, Geb 0.10 and the first milestone of Reactor 2.0!

And if there’s one thing I’d like to highlight in addition, that would be MrHaki’s release of his new book, the Spock Notebook, with all those nice recipes about our preferred testing framework.

Along with some valuable releases like the first release candidate of Gradle 2.2, there are interesting links on the topic of the Groovy Android story, as well as new glimpse on AST macros and AST pattern matching coming up. Worth a look!

In terms of events, the Greach conference in Spain has opened its Call for Paper, and the GR8Conf Europe crew reminds us that all the great content from the last edition is freely available on their YouTube channel.

No big highlight this week, but still plenty to learn from!

We have some minor releases, interesting articles on Spock, on how to leverage traits with Geb, some thoughts on reactive programming, new demos and tutorials for GrooScript.

And we can wish a happy birthday to the GR8 Ladies!

Releases

• Spring Tool Suite & Groovy Grails Tool Suite 3.6.2 released
• GrooScript 0.6.1 released
• GridGain 0.6.2 with better support of themes that use plain CSS and better handling of large files
• Spring Boot 1.1.8 released
• Spring Boot 1.2.0.M2 released
• Gretty 1.1.4 released
• Alain Stalder released an extensive manual for his Grengine, his alternative approach to integrating Groovy in your applications

Articles

• MrHaki’s Spocklight: indicate class under test with @Subject annotation
• MrHaki’s Groovy Goodness: Closure as a Class
• Kyle Boon is leveraging Groovy traits with Geb
• Luke Daley explains executional flexibility through reactive programming
• A follow-up post from Andrés Almiray on the new desktop application framework JSR
• Savant, a new Groovy-powered build tool?

Presentations

• Groovy introduction slides by the GR8 Ladies
• Colin Harrington on web security

News

• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 41

Interview

• Interview of Hans Dockter on Gradle and continuous delivery

Tweets

• Groovy makes Android code much more concise
• The GR8 Ladies celebrate their first birthday!
• Joe Wolf notes that Groovy reached 10,000 questions on Stack Overflow
• Eugene Kamenev is investigating bring GORM-like features for Groovy on Android<, to deal with building UI, handling validation, and more
• Youri Ackx liked Guillaume Laforge’s funny slide from his JavaOne presentation about how to represent map / reduce, sandwich-style
• Ratpack adds more Promise operations and improved the documentation
• Dierk König says the builder pattern in Groovy is a great example of the state monad
• Graeme Rocher waves goodbye to the old Grails build system
• Gradle features a handful of plugins for JavaScript / front-end build automation
• One could wish all front end development be done with Groovy and GrooScript?
• Spring Boot 1.1.8 available through GVM
• Spring Boot 1.2.0.M2 available through GVM

Code snippets

• GrooScript for client-side templating with the HTML builder or with Groovy templates

Events

• Baruch Sadogursky will be speaking about AST transformations at JavaDay Kiev and will wow the crowds with Groovy Puzzlers at JavaDay Kiev and Jokerconf!
• Iván López will be talking about “Metaprogramming with Groovy” at GeeCON Prague next 23rd October
• The Greach conference is being prepared and is taking shape, and the organizers are looking for sponsors
• GR8Conf Europe 2015 is in the works, as the team reunites

Back from JavaOne, where the Groovy project received its “Best Tech - Geek Choice Awards” from ZeroTurnaround, and where it win the Script Bowl competion this year again!

Releases

• Griffon 2.0.0 final released!
• Ratpack 0.9.9 is out moving to Java 8 as a base requirement
• Alain Stalder releases Grengine, another approach to running and embedding Groovy
• RxGroovy 1.0.0-RC-1 was released with a new artifact ID

Articles

• Marcin Zajączkowski comes back with Part 2 of what’s coming up in Spock 1.0
• Andrés Almiray explains it’s time for a desktop application framework JSR
• Trisha Gee is using Groovy to insert XML into MongoDB
• Hans Dockter published the Gradleware July-September newsletter
• André Steingreß writes about principals tracking in Grails
• Part 8 of the series “I don’t like Hibernate / Grails”
• A Spock quick tip for Grails integration tests from André Steingreß
• Quick Gradle tip: setting Bintray attributes for Gradle plugins
• Tomás Lin on Spring Boot and Webjars: overwriting configuration during runtime
• Burt Beckwith answers a Stack Overflow question on overriding Grails’ default create-app files

Presentations

• Ixchel Ruiz and Andrés Almiray demonstrated the funky-ness of Groovy at JavaOne 2014
• Cédric Champeau presented “rethinking API design with traits in Groovy” at JavaOne 2014
• Guillaume Laforge posted his JavaOne 2014 slides about “Groovy in the light of Java 8”
• Guillaume Laforge published his slides about “Groovy in 2014 and beyond” from JavaOne 2014
• Guillaume Laforge presented Groovy on Android at DroidCon Paris 2014

News

• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 39
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 40

Tweets

• Groovy reaches first place on the podium, along with Clojure, beating JRuby and Scala at JavaOne 2014’s Script Bowl competition
• Groovy received its Best Tech Geek Choice Award from ZeroTurnaround at JavaOne 2014
• Cédric Champeau is looking into integrating Sergei Egorov’s Groovy macros into Groovy 2.4
• Dierk König says the finish line is in sight for Groovy in Action, second edition
• If you use dependency classifiers (like Groovy’s “indy”) in Gradle builds with IntelliJ IDEA, you might want to vote for this issue as it’s broken in Intellij IDEA
• If you like SASS and Gradle, Danny Hyun notes there’s a plugin for that
• Russel Hart notes that as of Ratpack 0.9.9 you can stream your Hystrix metrics out to the Hystrix dashboard or Turbine
• Russel Hart remarks that Ratpack’s GroovyChainAction is replaced with Action<Chain> and the Groovy.chain() call in Ratpack 0.9.9
• Craig Burke is readying his Angular.JS Grails Lazybones template

Code snippets

• Ken Sipe’s code samples from his JavaOne 2014 Spock presentation
• More GrooScript demos available
• Ratpack promises, a comparison between Java 7 and 8

Events

• Mac Liaw will be speaking about Ratpack at 1 Dev Day Detroit
• Andrés Almiray is presenting Gradle, harder, better, stronger, faster, at Jazoon

Books

• Jon Kerridge publishes two ebooks on concurrency and parallelism and makes good use of Groovy

Here’s a short column this week, a bit in advance, as I’m flying to JavaOne tomorrow to spread the Groovy truth!

Releases

• Cédric Champeau announced the release of Groovy 2.3.7
• Spring Boot 1.1.7 released

Articles

• MrHaki’s Gradle Goodness: running Groovy scripts as application
• The reason the internet was invented or cat pictures for the win, by Ken Kousen, sprinkled with bits of Groovy JSON and Swing code
• Exporting Grails’ i18n messages into Javascript
• Andrés Almiray’s Gradle Glam on features that would benefit the Gradle community
• Jorge Martin on the inception and the Groovy Swiss Knife library for Android and the problems encountered with Android Studio’s Groovy support

Presentations

• Guillaume Laforge presented on Groovy on Android at DroidCon Paris 2014

Tweets

• Robert Fletcher noticed IntelliJ IDEA’s clever capability of properly renaming closures it parameter
• Java’s Duke is looking pretty Groovy at JavaOne!
• Groovy 2.3.7 is available on GVM
• A pretty Groovy book!
• Jon DeJong makes Groovy strongly typed by hitting the keys harder when coding!
• New component selection and replacement rules for upcoming Gradle 2.2
• Robert Guerra shows a screenshot of deployment of Ratpack with Java 8 on Heroku

Code snippets

• Cédric Champeau shows a fun snippet of code using metaprogramming to let Groovy be pretty tolerant to typos in method names