Happy New Year best wishes are still flowing around, and new year resolutions have been sealed, but despite the busy times and good moments spent with our families, the Groovy ecosystem is still abuzz with news! You’d think it’d be a quiet third edition of the Groovy Weekly column, but no, we’ve all been busy with Groovy stuff! So what’s in store?

Releases

• Ratpack 0.9.0 has been released
• Peter Ledbrook published version 0.6 of Lazybones with support for multiple template engines
• Gernot Starke released v1.0 of pdfStamper, a small Griffon / Groovy-based utility to add page / chapter / header to pdf files
• Ken Krebs released his version of gsheets, a lightweight DSL wrapper over Apache POI, that is intended to make extracting data from, or pushing data to spreadsheets simple and declarative. It can be used with Groovy 1.8, Grails 2 and Java 6+.
• Yoshiya Hinosawa created a Gradle plugin for CoverAlls.IO, a service which gathers your code coverage for history and analytics purpose

Articles

• Alex Staveley covers Groovy’s “smooth operators”: Elvis, spaceship, safe navigation, spread, field access, method references
• Mark Perry blogs about referentially transparent input / output in Groovy
• Ben Limmer explains how to automatically publish to Sonatype with Gradle and Travis CI
• Michael Scharhag covers how to use Hibernate filters in Grails
• Cyril Mottier shows the Android Gradle build in action

Presentations

• In this SpringOne2GX presentation, Hans Dockter discusses build systems from a declarative vs. imperative perspective, the importance of a rich execution model and problems with POM, providing examples from Gradle, Maven and Ant
• Ken Sipe spoke about Spock during the JavaZone conference and covers mocking, stubbing and spying with Spock
• At GR8Conf US 2013, Marco Vermeulen explains using Cucumber and Groovy to apply BDD to a project, using Gherkin for writing scenarios, Groovy for step definitions, Spock for new features, and running Cucumber features
• At SpringOne2GX 2013, in his Application Architecture in Groovy talk, Dan Woods presented the strengths and flexibility in Groovy, including its dynamic nature, categories and mixins, to create a powerful, maintainable, and simple application architecture
• At GR8Conf US 2013, Zan Thrash advises on using some of the Node.js tools in order to improve Grails development: lint, concat, minify, testing JavaScript files, etc.

Mailing-list discussions

• Andrés Almiray gives a status on the future Griffon 2.0 and asks for feedback

Tweets

• Lazybones 0.6 is available through GVM
• Peter Ledbrook is adding Handlebars templating support to Lazybones
• Peter Ledbrook has pushed the Groovy Handlebars template engine into Bintray JCenter
• Anton Arhipov tweeted about the latest update of the GMaven Groovy Maven plugin
• Work has started on getting Ratpack in the TechEmpower framework benchmark
• Testing Ratpack modules and subsystem in isolations
• reStructuredText support via JRst and PegDown markdown parser are integrated into 0.6.0-SNAPSHOT of the Grain static website generator

Code snippet

• Kenneth Endfinger wished us all a Happy New Year with some Groovy asciiart (snippet)!

Jobs

• Antony Jones is looking for Grails contractors in London

Other news

• First Grails diary of the year by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen
• The Ratpack reference documentation has just had a facelift

Events

• GrailsConf India, organized by IntelliGrape Software, is taking place in New Delhi, India, on January 11th
• 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
• Russel Winder is going to present a workshop on Spock at the Nordev conference
• Guillaume Laforge is speaking at JFokus 2014 about how to benefit form using Groovy, when, why and how
• Cédric Champeau is speaking (in French, at the Riviera Groovy/Grails user group) about how to contribute to Groovy

Don’t forget you can contribute to this weekly column of Groovy news, and that you can subscribe through a newsletter.

For the second Groovy Weekly column, on the eve of a new year, I’d like to wish you a very Groovy year, and share with you the following links, hoping you’ll have some spare time to look into them while you’re celebrating.

Releases

• A new project appeared on the Groovy ecosystem radar: Grain, announced by Victor Vlasenko on the Groovy mailing-list. Grain is a promising lightweight and yet powerful static website generator for Groovy which purpose is to make demanding site implementation an intuitive and enjoyable. Grain framework is equally well-suited for any static website, whether it is a complex and sophisticated company site or a simple and neat blog. The framework applies elegant website building concepts and allows to develop rapidly by making and seeing changes on the fly.
• Kunal Dabir created a Lazybone template for creating Groovy libraries readily publishable to Bintray, CI with Travis-CI, with a Gradle build and wrapper, a .gitignore file and more.
• Last week we mentioned the release of CodeNarc 0.20, and the associated CodeNarc Eclipse plugin has also been released
• Andrés Almiray released Gipsy, an AST transformation to simplify the use of the Service Provider Interface, similar to the Jipsy annotation processing toolkit he also created:
• Stergios Papadimitriou shares with us his project, GroovyLab, a MATLAB-like environment for the Java Virtual Machine. GroovyLab is an open source project based on the Groovy language. GroovyLab is efficient and can be an interesting open-source alternative to commercial packages, especially for the scientific community familiar with Java. The article introduces the architecture of GroovyLab and presents some examples of using GroovyLab to do useful work.

Articles

• A very extensive Groovy / Grails eXchange wrapdown post by Dan Woods covering all the talks he attended in detail
• Dustin Marx covers some Gradle command-line conveniences
• Dustin Marx reviews the book by Tim Berglund: “Gradle, beyond the basics”

Presentations from SpringOne2GX

• In this presentation on InfoQ, recorded at SpringOne2GX, Burt Beckwith discusses performing transactions in Grails, covering services, customizing transaction attributes (isolation, propagation levels), two-phase commit, using JMS, and testing the code
• Again recorded at SpringOne2GX, Paul King speaks about leveraging Groovy for capturing business rules, illustrated with various DSLs written in Groovy, highlighting several logic solving APIs and looks at the pros and cons of the various approaches (including tool support, flexibility, lock-in)

Interviews

• Stephen Chin interviews Luke Daley during the Devoxx conference, about Ratpack, Gradle, Geb

Mailing-list discussions

• Thibault Kruse discusses possible improvements to the groovysh command-line shell in this mailing-list discussion. Don’t hesitate to provide your input!

Tweets

• Luke Daley mentions his testing of the Waffle.IO service (a nice kanban board representation of Github issues) to organize and keep track of the backlog, ongoing development of Ratpack
• Dan Woods joins the Ratpack project as a new committer
• Ratpack now supports “fat jar” deployment
• Bert van den Brande used the Gradle Shadow plugin to create an executable JAR in no time
• Václav Pech, GPars project lead, is sprinkling a few Groovy’s few @DelegatesTo annotations over the GPars codebase operators to make them more @CompileStatic-friendly

Job

• Dan Woods relays the job post from @good_technology that is looking for a Grails developer in San Francisco, with mobile skills as well

Other news

• The last Grails diary of the year from by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen, if you want to be up-to-date on all Grails plugins news
• Bobby Warner contributes support for the PATCH method to the Ratpack project

Events

• GrailsConf India, organized by IntelliGrape Software, is taking place in New Delhi, India, on January 11th
• 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

Happy New Year!

Almost the end of the year! On behalf of the Groovy development team, let me wish you the best and grooviest year for 2014!

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...