Welcome to the Groovy Weekly news brief!

As the name implies, I’m going to try to make regular (in theory on a weekly basis) column of all the interesting news, presentations, code snippets, events, conferences related to the Groovy ecosystem.

And as a Christmas present, here’s the first issue!

Your feedback is important, and we’d be happy to hear about your thoughts on a regular column about Groovy related news: what are your expectations, what you’d like to hear about, what news bits are of higher interest to you, how you would like this information to be delivered, etc.

This is with great pleasure that the Groovy team is announcing today the release of Groovy 2.2, the latest version of the Groovy programming language.

Groovy 2.2 features:

• Implicit closure coercion
• @Memoized AST transformation for methods
• Define base script classes with an annotation
• New DelegatingScript base class for scripts
• New @Log variant for the Log4j2 logging framework
• @DelegatesTo with generics type tokens
• Precompiled type checking extensions
• Groovysh enhancements
• Bintray’s JCenter repository
• OSGi manifests for the “invoke dynamic” JARs
• And other minor bug fixes, enhancements and performance improvements

You can read more detailed release notes as well as have a look at all the JIRA issues fixed.

Following up my presentations from JAX London, I was interviewed about Groovy for JAXenter, with questions about what Groovy brings to Java developers, the recent surge in popularity as Groovy broke the TIOBE index top 20 languages, my favorite projects in the Groovy ecosystem.

I was interviewed by Darryl Taft from eWeek yesterday about the Groovy programming language’s recent popularity boost. You can read the two-page long interview here:
Groovy programming language sees major boost in popularity

You’ll certainly be interested in the answers to some of the questions, in particular who’s using Groovy, or for which use cases Groovy is being used:

— Why do you think Groovy has gained in popularity over the last year?

Read more...

Yesterday, the Groovy programming language team released the release candidate for Groovy 2.2, as well as a bug-fix release of Groovy 2.1.8.

Here’s the announcement I sent on the various communication channels:

The Groovy team is happy to announce the release of the release candidate of Groovy 2.2, as well as a bug-fix release for Groovy 2.1.8.

As you can guess with this release candidate, the final version of Groovy 2.2 is fast approaching, and we’d be happy to get as much feedback on this release as possible, to squash potential bugs before the general availability of 2.2. So please be sure to test your applications with this release candidate.

Read more...

For the first time, Groovy enters the top 20 of the TIOBE programming language index, as you can see in the table below:

As the headline and first paragraph indicate:

TIOBE Programming Community Index for October 2013
October Headline: Lightweight Java language Groovy enters top 20
Programming language

Groovy enters the top 20 for the first time. Groovy is an object-oriented scripting language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It is fully compatible with Java, making it easy to combine Java programs with Groovy. There is quite some competition in this field of lightweight languages that fit together with Java. Groovy beats other well-known JVM languages such as Scala (#36), JavaFX Script (#41) and Clojure (#76). Let’s see whether it can keep its top 20 position the next few months.

Read more...

The Groovy team is happy to announce the releases of the second beta of Groovy 2.2, along with a bug fix release of Groovy 2.1.7.

We’re close to moving towards RC mode for the upcoming Groovy 2.2 release, and we’d be happy to hear about your feedback about this new version when used in your projects. Please have a moment to test it against your code, and tell us if you notice any problem or regression.

Václav Pech just announced the release of GPars 1.1, the multi-paradigm concurrency and parallel Groovy-friendly toolkit:

The GA release of GPars 1.1.0 has just been published and is ready for you to grab. It brings gradual improvements into dataflow as well as a few other domains. Some highlights:

• LazyDataflowVariable added to allow for lazy asynchronous values
• Timeout for Selects
• Added a Promise-based API for value selection through the Select class
• Enabled listening for bind errors on DataflowVariables
• Minor API improvement affecting Promise and DataflowReadChannel
• Protecting agent’s blocking methods from being called from within commands
• Updated to the latest 0.7.0 GA version of Multiverse
• Migrated to Groovy 2.0
• Used @CompileStatic where appropriate
• A few bug fixes

You can download GPars 1.1.0 directly or grab it from the maven repo.

Read more...

C’est l’été, il fait très chaud, et j’ai plein de menthe dans mon jardin… d’où l’idée de faire un dessert rafraîchissant : une glace à la menthe maison !

Un petit problème aussi : je n’ai pas de sorbetière, donc il faut faire sans !

Alors que nous faut-il :

• 25 cl de lait
• une bonne grosse poignée de feuilles de menthe fraîche
• 2 oeufs (2 jaunes et 2 blancs)
• 60 g de sucre en poudre, ou idéalement sucre glace (10 g + 50 g)
• 25 cl de crème liquide (non allégée)
• 1 pincée de sel

Tout d’abord, il faut laisser infuser la menthe dans le lait, dans une casserole, pendant une bonne vingtaine de minutes, à couvert, sans faire bouillir le lait. Cela nous donnerait un bon lait au goût de menthe !

I recently came across InstantServer.io, a nice little service that allows you to instantiate an Ubuntu server for testing, for 35 minutes, on Amazon EC2. You click on the green button, and you’re given an account and a password, as well as the details to connect onto the machine through SSH.

Please note that the service seems to be victim of its success, as requesting a new server takes more and more time it seems.