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!

The Groovy development team’s just released Groovy 2.0.4, a bug fix for our Groovy 2.0 branch.

It fixes some important issues we’ve had with generics with the stub generator, as well as several fixes related to the static type checking and static compilation features. We also worked on the recompilation issues with the GroovyScriptEngine.

You can download Groovy 2.0.4 here: http://groovy.codehaus.org/Download

The artifacts are not yet on Maven Central, but will shortly.

I’ll echo here the two new releases of the Groovy programming language:

This is with great pleasure that the Groovy development team announces the releases of Groovy 2.0.2 and Groovy 1.8.8.

Those two releases are essentially just bug fix releases, with only minor improvements. In particular, work has been done in the area of the static type checker and static compilation, in the GroovyScriptEngine, as well as further performance improvements for the “invoke dynamic” support as well as plain Groovy. We also upgraded the version of GPars of the distribution to use the newly released 1.0-beta-3.

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Some of my friends are going back to vi like me, for instance Hibernate’s Emmanuel and IzPack’s Julien. I also mentioned a few good links about that move on the French Les Castcodeurs podcast. And to be precise, I’m using MacVim on my MacBook Pro laptop, but also vim on the command-line.

Emmanuel and Julien gave some good tips and links too, and like Julien, I’m going to show you my current .vimrc in case anyone’s interested:

The Groovy development team is happy to announce the releases of Groovy 2.0.1, 1.8.7 and 1.7.11! That’s the first time we release three versions at the same time.

Those three versions are essentially just bug fix releases. The 1.8.7 release contains a lot of the bugfixes that were already integrated in Groovy 2.0.0, so it’s just an alignment with the Groovy 2 branch. In the future, Groovy 1.8.x and Groovy 2.x will be maintained in parallel. But the Groovy 1.7 branch is now in end-of-life and won’t be maintained further.

Over the weekend, I was brainstorming some ideas about what a second generation Groovy Web Console could look like. I was particularly thinking about collaborative editing Groovy snippets of code in the cloud.

There’s a trend towards IDEs in the Cloud, like for instance Cloud-IDE, allowing you to work on your projects remotely, on the cloud, from the comfort of your browser, even letting you push new versions of your apps in your favorite PaaS.

Although I’ve gone at length through the key major features of Groovy 2.0in the InfoQ article, there have been a few smaller ones which are interesting to note. And groovy guys like Tim Yates, André Steingress or Mr Hakki were quick to blog about them!

• inject() method with a default initial value
• takeWhile() and dropWhile() methods
• withDefault(), withEager() methods
• matchesPartially() method for matchers (to see if a string might match a pattern given more input)
• @NotYetImplemented transformation for test cases
• an iterable collectEntries() variant
• first() and last() working with iterables as well
• collate() method (although it’s also in 1.8.6 actually) (see coverage by Tim and Mr Hakki)
• calendar ranges (useful for iterating over days of a certain period)

Those are some smaller features compared to the big highlights of Groovy 2.0, but they are definitely useful and make you more productive every day!

There are various options for building your Groovy projects: including Ant with the Groovyc Ant task, or with Gradle Groovy plugin. But today, I’d like to speak about Maven. You have actually two possible choices: GMaven or the Groovy Eclipse Maven plugin.

GMaven

GMaven 1.4 already allowed you to use Groovy 2.0 even before the final release of Groovy, although a new 1.5 version is about to be released soon, which should also include the option to use the “invoke dynamic” support which is currently missing for GMaven 1.4.

Right after the release of Groovy 2.0, our intrepid Eclipse team released a new version of the Groovy Eclipse plugin. The big highlights are, of course, the Groovy 2.0 support, but also the support of Juno and the move of the sources of the plugin to GitHub, plus some new refactorings and quickfixes.
Here’s Andrew’s full announcement:

Hot on the heels of Groovy 2.0, we are pleased to announce the release of Groovy-Eclipse 2.7.0.

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The newly released Groovy 2.0 brings key static features to the language with static type checking and static compilation, adopts JDK 7 related improvements with Project Coin syntax enhancements and the support of the new “invoke dynamic” JVM instruction, and becomes more modular than before. In this article, we’re going to look into those new features in more detail.

A “static theme” for a dynamic language

Static type checking

Groovy, by nature, is and will always be a dynamic language. However, Groovy is often used as a “Java scripting language”, or as a “better Java” (ie. a Java with less boilerplate and more power features).