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.

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!