This is with great pleasure that the Gaelyk team announces the release of Gaelyk 2.0, the lightweight toolkit for developing applications on Google App Engine with the Groovy dynamic language.

For the impatient, go directly to the download page!

It’s been long in the making, and there are quite a lot of new features to speak about, like the migration to Groovy 2.1 and GAE 1.8, the new Search DSL, improvements to the URL routing system, various performance optimizations, and more.

Since I started using Gradle for building my projects, as soon as I needed to create a brand new project from scratch, I wished that Gradle guided my hand and created the right directory structure and minimal Gradle build script.

A bit less than two years ago, I was inspired by Dierk’s gist providing a basic build that provided two tasks, one for creating the directory layout, and the other one to create the Gradle wrapper. I turned that gist into a blog post of my own, with just minor version updates, as I wanted to remember how to do that the next time I’d create a new Gradle-based project.

The Groovy team is always looking at ways to further improve and encourage the collaboration and contributions from the community.

Today, the we are** looking for a sponsor for a dedicated server** that would host our new Continuous Integration server. If you or your company is interested in helping Groovy by contributing hardware and/or hosting, please contact us.

The details of the project are available here.

On behalf of the Groovy team, thanks in advance for your help and support!

Like every year, GR8Conf Europe takes place in the beautiful city of Copenhagen in Denmark. It’s where all the talented and cool Groovy ecosystem folks meet, and spread the love about their technologies, including Groovy, Grails, Gradle, Spock, GPars, and more.

I’ll be speaking about the latest developments on the Groovy 2.x branch, and what our plans are going forward. You can also have a look at the preliminary agenda published on the GR8Conf website, to see familiar names like Jürgen Höller, Venkat Subramaniam, Dierk König, Graeme Rocher, Burt Beckwith, Mr Haki, Luke Daley, Russel Winder… You’re sure to find some great content delivered by the experts themselves!

Here’s my announcement for the Groovy 2.1 release, and be sure to check out the full release notes of the release!

The Groovy team is pleased to announce the release of Groovy 2.1.0.
With over 1.7 million downloads in 2012, a strong ecosystem, Groovy continues its development and adoption, refines existing features and evolves new ones.

In this new release, Groovy 2.1:

• offers full support for the JDK 7 “invoke dynamic” bytecode instruction and API,

  Read more...

L’autre jour sur Facebook, je suis tombé sur cette liste de “life-hacks”, dont certains sont vraiment malins… et parmi eux, il y avait une recette de brownie dans un mug. Je l’ai retrouvée là, mais j’ai également trouvé d’autres variantes, comme celle de Lindt.

Du coup, par gourmandise et pour faire plaisir à ma fille, nous nous sommes concocté notre propre version de ces deux recettes, que je vous livre aujourd’hui !

Déjà, les ingrédients :

Since the world didn’t seem to end today, it is with great pleasure that we bring under your Christmas tree the following presents: the release of Groovy 2.1.0-beta-1 and Groovy 2.0.6.
Groovy 2.0.6 is a bug fix release for our Groovy 2.0.X line, whereas Groovy 2.1.0-beta-1 contains new features.
You can download Groovy at the usual location: http://groovy.codehaus.org/Download

The JIRA release notes can be found here:

• Groovy 2.1.0-beta-1: http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&version=18598

• Groovy 2.0.6: http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&version=18852

More extensive release notes will be available for the final Groovy 2.1.0 release, but please let me highlight the following key new features:

Václav Pech just announced the final release of GPars 1.0, the concurrency and parallel toolkit for Groovy and Java.

We’ll bundle GPars 1.0 in the Groovy 2.1 distribution coming very soon!

Let me quote some of the key changes and enhancements of this release (quoting from the “what’s new” section of the user guide):

Asynchronous functions

• Allowed for delayed and explicit thread pool assignment strategies for asynchronous functions
• Performance tuning to the asynchronous closure invocation mechanism

Parallel collections

Read more...

InfoQ is running a reader-driven survey titled “What’s your next JVM language”.

Among the candidates to be ranked, you’ll find:

• Groovy
• Java 8
• Ceylon
• Kotlin
• Clojure
• Scala
• Xtend
• Fantom
• Mirah

As well as the languages ported to the JVM like:

• JRuby
• Jython
• Javascript (Rhino and soon Nashorn)
• Erlang
• Scheme

The interesting aspect of the survey is that it’s not just a mere poll, but you can rank those JVM languages across two criterion: the percentage of lines of code (less or more), and the adoption (like now, in 3 months, in a year). It certainly gives more perspective than a mere poll on your favorite language. The downside might be that it’s too easy to rank the ones you dislike negatively without objectivity, but well, polls are like that too :-)

Monday I’ll be flying to San Francisco for the JavaOne conference, where there will be tons of sessions and BOF speaking about Groovy or mentioning it, and where I’ll be participating at two sessions, one of the novelties of Groovy 2 and the ScriptBowl.

Let me highlight a few of those sessions:

• What’s new in Groovy 2
  Shameless plug, that’s my session, where I speak about some of the key features of Groovy 1.8, and then quickly delve into the major features of Groovy 2
• What’s new in Grails 2
  Graeme Rocher will cover and demo the key features of Grails 2.x
• Griffon, up close and personal
  Andres Almiray will tell us all about the Griffon rich desktop application framework
• The Groovy Ecosystem
  Again, Andres on stage here, to speak about the many projects built atop Groovy, for your build, for testing and more
• Walk through Groovy’s AST transformations
  Andres walks us through Groovy’s mechanism to plugin into the compiler to bring powerful compile-time metaprogramming abilities to your classes
• Design patterns in Groovy
  Venkat Subramaniam revisits classical design patterns as well as new ones
• Improving your Groovy kung-fu
  Dierk König highlight key features of the Groovy language and nice library you can leverage to make you a better and more productive Groovy developer
• A common development framework, from JSP to GSP, at CERN
  The CERN research center (the great hadron collider, etc) talk about their usage of Groovy and Grails, with concrete examples, screenshots and more
• GroovyFX: making JavaFX Groovy
  Jim Clarke and Dierk talk about the GroovyFX library, a thin DSL on top of JavaFX to express your creativity with JavaFX in a nice Groovy idiom
• Grezi and GroovyFX
  Bertrand Goetzmann and Stephen Chin speak about GroovyFX and show a concrete usage with the Grezi framework, to build powerful visual and interactive presentations
• ScriptBowl: the battle of the JVM based languages
  I’ll finish with the ScriptBowl, a friendly 2-round battle comparing some of the popular languages of the JVM platform. Hopefully, I’ll try to win again this year, but the competition is tough! Fingers crossed! Come in number to support me and make Groovy win again!