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.

Vacations won’t stop me from updating you about all the latest developments in the Groovy community! In this short introduction, I’d like to bring your attention to the fact that the Groovy ecosystem got accepted as an organization for the Google Summer of Code program. So if you are a student, or know students, or engineering schools, universities, etc, interested in contributing to projects of the Groovy ecosystem, please don’t hesitate to spread the word!

An interesting column this week thanks to the major release of Griffon 1.5, but also a minor release of Grails 2.3.6 which brings the often requested standalone GORM support!

Releases

• Grails 2.3.6 released, including GORM standalone support
• Griffon 1.5 is released

Articles

• Cédric Champeau details in a two parts article his work on a new template engine for Groovy, that is fast, can be type checked and statically compiled
• Second part of the article from Cédric Champeau about his new markup template engine for Groovy with advanced explanations about static type checking extensions and static compilation
• More on the Groovy client for the Light-Table IDE
• André Steingreß covers Java-based configuration with Grails
• Marco Vermeulen explains how to deploy apps like Ratpack, Spring Boot or Dropwizard on Heroku thanks to Gradle
• VoltDB integrates Groovy for its datastore inline procedure language
• An article on RelProxy, a project for a hot class reloader and scripting for Java and Groovy
• Enum to Switch on Class types in Java and Groovy

Presentations

• Ken Kousen presents advanced Groovy features, such as closure coercion, mixins, simple runtime metaprogramming, operator overloading, drop and take, overlooked methods in the Groovy JDK, and more (recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013)
• Greg Turnquist demoes using Spring Mail, Security, REST, GridFS, Bootstrap and jQuery in a production grade Grails application
• John Engelman presents a talk on enterprise Grails with Spring Batch for batch processing

Mailing-list discussions

• Rick Hightower’s been working on the new JSON parser for Groovy 2.3 to give Groovy the fastest JSON parser available on the JVM, and along with Andrey Blochestov they are also looking at making the creation of JSON payloads also super fast

Code snippets

• Andrés Almiray on the simplicity of functional testing for Griffon applications
• Miguel de la Cruz shows his experiment with a minimal web server implemented with Ratpack

Tweets

• Griffon 1.5 available through GVM
• GVM now offers Gradle 1.11 too
• Johannes Link, contributor of the @TailRecursive transformation for Groovy 2.3, compared the performance of @TailRecursive on methods vs trampoline() on closures, and indicate that the performance advantage is for @TailRecursive
• Dave Syer shows an example of a Spring Boot controller written in Groovy that outputs JSON
• Bobby Warner notes that the Asset pipeline plugin replaces the resources plugin by default from Grails 2.4 onward

Other news

• The @TailRecursive transformation has been contributed by Johannes Link and Cédric Champeau merged the pull request into the Groovy 2.3 branch
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Week #7 of the Grails diary

Books

• The final version of the Gradle in Action eBook is available

Events

• Registration for GR8Conf Europe 2014 is open
• You can find the Greach conference on Lanyard
• A new Groovy user group in Warsaw, Poland
• Peter Ledbrook is speaking about why your build matters, and the importance of Gradle

In Stockholm for the JFokus conference, I was happy to meet some of the members of the Groovy community, and had the chance to speak about the Groovy usage patterns and how companies integrate Groovy. But while I’m having fun in Sweden (with heaps of fever though), we are laying out the new infrastructure for the Groovy project with the help of JetBrains and JFrog, or work is underway to make Groovy’s JSON support the fastest around (more infor to come soon)! So it’s been a busy week!

Releases

• Ratpack 0.9.1 is released, with performance and memory consumption improvements, as well as an RxJava module
• John Engelman releases version 2.0.0 of the Grails-Gradle plugin
• Cédric Champeau created a Gradle plugin for JBake, to be able to render static web sites as part of your Gradle build
• Release of an update to the Grails Api Toolkit plugin helping build API with REST, RPC and HATEOAS support

Articles

• The Groovy style guide shared by Guillaume Laforge echoing a conversation on Twitter about the bad practice of putting def everywhere
• Cédric Champeau details how to create your own static blog with JBake, Gradle and Github
• An article on Groovy Memoization by Brendon Anderson
• Why is Groovy groovy?
• Burt Beckwith offers one more approach for diagnosing spring-security-core login errors
• André Steingreß covers the Grails Audit plugin
• André Steingreß is covering Grails testing with Cucumber
• Following up on his previous post, André Steingreß continues his Grails testing with Cucumber
• Jochen Theodorou explains what class duplication is and how it happens
• Testing Grails with Cucumber, HTTPBuilder, and RemoteControl
• Ken Kousen plays with Groovy’s date support
• Hubert Klein Ikkink shares some tips about cleaning up your Grails projects
• Following up on MrHaki’s Grails clean-up tip, André Steingreß offers his own Grails tip for cleaning up everything in a single rm command
• Michael Scharhag blogs about using database views in Grails
• A tutorial on developing a Grails application with Facebook Connect
• A broad stroke overview of Grails web app development framework

Presentations

• Hubert Klein Ikkink, alias MrHaki, presented Getting Groovy, at GR8Conf Europe 2013.
• Ken Kousen advises Java developers how to do similar tasks in Groovy: building and testing applications, accessing both relational and NoSQL databases, accessing web services, and more.
• At GR8Conf US 2013, Craig Atkinson presents the advantages of using the Geb functional testing library for creating robust and readable tests with both JUnit and Spock, and configuring Geb for testing across multiple browsers.
• Recorded at GR8Conf US 2013, Kyle Boon reviews 3 frameworks for building RESTful WS (Grails, Dropwizard and Ratpack), comparing their code readability, maintainability, deployment, metrics collection, scalability and testability.
• At SpringOne2GX 2013, Joe Rinehart discusses some of the essential security topics for Grails (and Java) Web applications, showing how Grails can make life easier and the pitfalls of attempting to secure highly dynamic code.
• Ryan Vanderwerf explains setting up Terracotta and clustering a Grails application using Ehcache, HTTP Session in Tomcat, and Quartz. Recorded at GR8Conf US 2013.

Mailing-list discussions

• Dinko Srkoč announces the birth of his stream extension to Groovy’s Sql facility (potentially to be included in Groovy)

Code snippets

• Tim Yates is trying to implement Groovy’s collate() method with Java 8 streams and lambdas.
• Tim Yates offers a little sample showing how to display a little spinner icon in text mode for long running tasks

Tweets

• Cédric Champeau lobbies for having the normal “groovy” JAR to also “jarjar” the mandatory basic dependencies of ASM, Antlr and Commons-CLI, like with the Groovy all JAR. You can vote for that JIRA issue.
• Andrés Almiray tweets his desire to see a Gradle portal plugin soon
• Dierk König tweets about Groovy being for getting things done rather than for showing off!
• groovy.io are looking for sponsors for their upcoming hackathon
• The Grain static site generator introduces dynamic rendering anywhere
• Grails provides a command to generate a zip file to attach to a JIRA issue if you need to file a bug report with a reproducible problem
• Gradle 1.11-rc1 is available through GVM
• The Grails force-ssl plugin adds an @SSLRequired annotation
• Dan Woods published a new plugin for Grails for simplifying & streamlining the implementation of RESTful renderers

Other news

• Week 5 of the Grails diary by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen

Books

• The Groovy 2 Cookbook has its dedicated website
• A short review of the “Groovy 2 cookbook” book

Events

• SkillsMatter, the organizer of the Groovy / Grails eXchange conference since 2007, have overhauled their website, and you can already see the page for the upcoming GGeX 2014 edition
• Dan Woods is speaking about Grails 2.3’s Rest capabilities on February 27th at the San Francisco Grails meetup

Releases

• The first release candidate of Spring Boot is out, including its lean Groovy support
• Grain releases are now available in Maven Central
• Andrés Almiray released version 0.3.0 of his Gipsy AST transformation for simplifying usage of the service provider interface system

Articles

• Pivotal posted Guillaume Laforge’s article on the 3 million downloads of Groovy last year and his analysis
• Kyle Boon describes how to use meta-annotations to reduce boilerplate code
• GVM, the Groovy enVironment Manager, is featured on the methods and tools website, thanks to an article from Marco Vermeulen
• At SpringOne2GX 2013, Ryan Vanderwerf explains how to create and deploy a Grails application on AWS VPC using various services such as RDS, S3, autoscaling, S3FS, EBS, etc.
• An infographic from Cygnet Infotech about 6 reasons why Grails is an awesome Java Web framework
• Bert Van Den Brande writes about using Spring Boot with Groovy

Presentations

• ZeroTurnaround published a decision maker’s comparison of Maven, Gradle and Ant + Ivy
• Simpler stored procedures with Groovy by Jeff Sheets from Object Partners
• Burt Beckwith explains the general process of creating a Grails plug-in, the different types of plug-ins, and how to deploy, release and test them.
• Will Buck provides advice for those interested to upgrade their applications from Grails 1.x to 2.x
• Venkat Subramaniam shows how to implement several design patterns, including some GoF ones, using Groovy’s dynamic nature and closures.
• Jim Driscoll shows how to create Napili, a small program accepting user scripts to control a turtle using GroovyShell, the Binding, overriding behavior with set/getVariable and invokeMethod, and more, recorded at GR8Conf US 2013

Mailing-list discussions

• Lari Otari from the Grails team is calling for feedback on areas where the Grails unit testing support could be improved

Tweets

• Surge in popularity for Gradle in the ZeroTurnaround analysis
• Cédric Champeau succeeded making Groovy build with JDK 8, a first step forward to adding further Java 8 support in Groovy
• Johannes Link is reworking his @TailRecursive AST transformation for integration in Groovy 2.3
• A funny GORM-like tweet to encourage people to order the second edition of the Grails quick-start guide book

Jobs

• A remote Grails engineer for Wixab

Other news

• As usual, the the Grails Diary is out, week 5 of 2014, by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen
• A new look for the GR8Conf Europe website

Books

• The final chapters of Grails in Action, 2nd edition are now in Manning’s Early Access Program. Peter Ledbrook tells us issues can be reported in their GitHub issue tracker (https://github.com/GrailsInAction/graina2/issues)

Events

• First meetup of the GR8 Ladies of Minneapolis on January 29th
• The Call for Papers for the GR8Conf Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 2nd-4th 2014) and GR8Conf US (Minneapolis, USA, on July 28th-29th 2014) conferences is now open
• The Call for Papers for the Greach conference (Madrid, Spain, on March 28th and 29th 2014) is also open, till January 31st

Back in 2012, I was pretty happy and proud to see Groovy being used more and more, and reaching 1.7 million downloads in 2012. But the competition with other alternative language, I was personally not sure how those figures would evolve over the course of 2013. Fortunately, thanks to the hard work of the Groovy core development team and the friendly community and ecosystem, I’m happy to report an impressive ongoing growth for 2013: Groovy crosses the 3 million downloads a year mark!

We all know the Groovy community is super active, buzzing with useful projects in the ecosystem, but it’s always interesting to see how our projects evolve in terms of usage. Guillaume Laforge, project lead of Groovy, computed some download statistics for Groovy, and showed Groovy almost doubled its downloads, from 1.7 million downloads in 2012 up to 3 million downloads in 2013! All that, thanks to the hard work of the Groovy core team and the friendly and supportive community.