So what’s new this week?

We can highlight the first beta of Groovy 2.4 with the Android support, so users can start having a go at writing Android applications in Groovy! As well as bug fixes releases for Grails 2.3.x and 2.4.x.

Let’s also mention the launch of the Gradle plugin portal, announced last week at the Gradle Summit. And you’ll find also lots of presentations from the conference.

Releases

• Groovy 2.3.3 released and Groovy 2.4.0-beta-1 with Android support is out too
• Grails 2.4.1 and 2.3.10 released with loads of bug fixes
• Spring Boot 1.1 released
• Spring Boot 1.1.1 is out, fixing a little issue with the 1.1.0 release
• Marcin Erdmann announces the release of Geb 0.9.3
• Gretty 0.0.24 is out, with full support of Spring Boot 1.1.0
• Redis GORM 1.0.0 released
• Cédric Champeau released a JMH Gradle Plugin that integrates the JMH micro-benchmarking framework with your Gradle build

Articles

• Marc Palmer on the journey from Objective-C to Groovy
• MrHaki’s Getting Groovy extensive tutorial
• MrHaki’s Spock-light: on using an extra data variable for unroll description, based on Rob Fletcher’s GR8Conf Europe Spock talk
• Graeme Rocher blogs about a Gradle to get the nice GroovyDoc style from Groovy 2.3+ even if your project is using Groovy 2.2 or below
• Docker containers with Gradle in 4 easy steps, by Andy Glover
• Andrés Almiray wrote about the Griffon 2.0.0 beta
• Pooling web service connections in Grails by Jeff Sheets
• Building enterprise Mule applications with Gradle: part 1, part 2, part 3

Presentations from the Gradle Summit

• Justin Ryan from Netflix on the Nebula Gradle plugin, a useful test harness for Gradle plugins
• David Carr on cloud browser testing with Gradle and Geb
• Benjamin Muschko on web application deployments with Gradle
• Benjamin Muschko on provisioning virtualized infrastructure with Gradle
• Tobias Gesellchen shares his slides and code snippets on moving from Maven to Gradle
• Rene Gröschke on releasing with Gradle
• Dan Woods spoke about his Gradle provisioning plugin
• Andrés Almiray was spreading the word about Groovy, Gradle, Spock and more in Mexico (Spanish content)

News

• Gradleware just announced the launch of the Gradle plugin portal
• Guillaume Laforge shares the future look of the new Groovy documentation
• Jacobe Aae Mikkelsen on the Grails Diary week 24
• Learn about the GrooScript roadmap

Mailing-list posts

• An interesting thread on selling Groovy to your management
• A “provided scope” might come to Gradle

Code snippets

• An intentionally vulnerable Grails application for education purpose
• A demo project show-casing the Gradle tooling API

Contributions

• Grant McConnaughey contributed documentation on Groovy “statements”. Thank you, Grant. To all, please don’t hesitate to help us and contribute to the documentation effort!

Tweets

• A good way to get started with Groovy, with the GroovyKoans
• The Estonian emergency system is powered by Grails and Atmosphere
• Gradle 2.0 is 20% to 70% more performant than Gradle 1.0
• The Gradle plugin portal is built with Ratpack and RxJava
• You can start submitting your Gradle plugin to the Gradle plugin portal
• Cédric Champeau announces his JMH Gradle plugin and showing a sample project using it
• Andrés Almiray things the Gradle plugin portal has been rushed a bit, in time for Gradle Summit, as it’s still a bit complicated to submit plugins for inclusion
• Cédric Champeau notices only minor changes are needed to be able to build Groovy with Gradle 2.0-rc-1
• Initial work from Russell Hart bringing Ratpack into the “Reactive Streams” family
• Cédric Champeau would like to see the “new” keyword totally optional in Groovy, without using @Newify
• Guillaume Laforge suggests creating an “Enterprise” version of Groovy’s “spaceshift” operator
• Magnus Rundberget explores the Ratpack Gradle dependencies with the LightTable Groovy plugin 0.0.6
• The Grails GORM groovydoc is available standalone
• Cédric Champeau is surprised when people say using “def” makes a dynamic type (but “def” == “Object”)
• Cédric Champeau remarks that Groovy is a strongly typed language
• CRaSH 1.3.0 is available in GVM
• CrudZilla’s HiveMind web app generator is written largely in Groovy through JSR-223
• The Gradle Node plugin gives you an easy way to install and run Node.JS on Continuous Integration environments
• Burt Beckwith is going to each Groovy and Grails again at Harvard

Jobs

• A Groovy / Grails developer for Plano in Texas, USA

Events

• Cédric Champeau will speak about Groovy Traits at JavaOne
• JavaOne session acceptance emails are starting to flow, and the first Groovy sessions are appearing, for instance Guillaume Laforge’s on the latest & greatest Groovy, or Groovy in the light of Java 8
• MrHaki’s report on GR8Conf Europe 2014
• Quick summary from Andrés Almiray about the GR8Conf Europe 2014 Hackergarten

The Groovy team is very happy to announce the joint releases of Groovy 2.3.3 and Groovy 2.4-beta-1.

Groovy 2.3.3 is a bug fix release, particularly covering the recent issues discovered around anonymous inner classes. Please upgrade to 2.3.3 if you’ve been facing such issues.

Groovy 2.4.0-beta-1 comes pretty early, as we would like to come back to releasing milestones on a more regular pace, compared with how late we released the first beta of Groovy 2.3. We really want you, our users, to be able to give us feedback as soon as possible!

GR8Conf Europe is over, but there’s a lot to learn from the conference, with all the interesting conference sessions that took place there in Copenhagen.

The themes for this week will be around GR8Conf, of course, but also about Groovy on Android, again the Swift language, and also the first impressive demo of Grails 3.0!

Right after the conference also took place the annual Groovy DevCon meetup, gathering core members of the Groovy team, Grails team, and members of the Groovy ecosystem. Lots of interesting tidbits about what’s coming up in Groovy!

Direct live from GR8Conf Europe!

Several speakers already uploaded their presentation slides, as you shall see in the “presentations” sections. And the videos will be available later after the conference.

At the same time in San Francisco, Apple is running its WWDC conference and announced the creation of a new language, Swift, that looks a lot like Groovy as several Groovy users have already noticed on Twitter. That’s nice to see Groovy also influences other languages!

During Apple’s WWDC conference was announced a new programming language, called Swift, targeted at developing on iOS devices (and likely Mac OS X in the future as well).

When looking through the slides from the keynote, online documentation, and iTunes ebook, an acquainted Groovy eye would immediately notice the inspiration the Swift designers took from Groovy.

In one of the slides covering Swift, Groovy was even mentioned as one of the languages clearly making developers much more productive, although I disagree with the placement of Groovy in terms of performance as Groovy should clearly be leading the pack of the bottom right hand quadrant.

The Groovy team is pleased to announce the release of Groovy 2.3.2, a bug fix release for our 2.3 main branch.

If you have already moved to Groovy 2.3, we strongly recommend you to upgrade to 2.3.2 rapidly, as our two prior 2.3 releases were using a buggy version of ASM which was generating wrong bytecode for inner classes.

You can check this issue for more details: https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GROOVY-6808

Since any code compiled with Groovy 2.3.0 or 2.3.1 and using inner classes is likely to have faulty bytecode, please make sure to recompile everything with 2.3.2
Our detailed JIRA change log: http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&version=20402

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