Tim Fox yesterday announced the release of Vert.x 1.0. Vert.x is a kind ofasynchronous application development environment and server. It works on the JVM, with JDK 7, and supports several languages like Java, Groovy, Ruby or JavaScript. As the website puts it, vert.x can be defined along the following axis: polyglot: supporting Java, Groovy, Ruby and JavaScript or a mix and match of any of these even in a single application simplicity: just a few lines of code to create your servers and components, without any XML configuration or anything like that, without being too simplistic scalability: with Netty under the hood, with a message passing approach, it’s taking full advantage of the cores of your CPU(s) concurrency: vert. Read more...

In the Vi vs Emacs war, I’m in the Vi camp. I’m using Vim on the command-line to quickly edit files, and I’m also using MacVim on my Mac as my text editor. When I’m not using an IDE or the Groovy Console, I also want to be able to edit and run my Groovy scripts in my text editor. It’s not too difficult to run a Groovy script from Vi, you can simply do: Read more...

This is this time of the year where all the Groovy hackers and fans are meeting together in Denmark, Copenhagen, for the GR8Conf conference. A conference dedicated to Groovy, Grails, Gradle, Griffon, Spock, GPars and all the Groovy ecosystem. If you’re interested in these technologies or are already using them, this is the opportunity you shouldn’t miss. Also, you’re pretty lucky, because I have a ticket for half the price to offer you! Read more...

It happens once in a while that I want to find all files containing a certain string. I know command-line tools such as grep, cat, and find, but I never remember the right combination to achieve that task. So as to remember and reference it later, I write this small blog post to remind me how to do it: find . -type f -exec grep YOURSTRING /dev/null {} \; The find . Read more...

Once in a while, I stumble upon the need of being able to tell whether a string could match a certain regular expression pattern, if it were given some more characters. For example, a user is typing a time in an input field, following the pattern of 2 digits, a colon, and 2 other digits. He enters the first two digits and the colon, and we’re wondering if the time could be valid if he entered some more keystrokes. Read more...

Tomorrow I’m flying to Krakow, in Poland, to speak about the upcoming Groovy 2.0 release, at the 33rd Degree conference. I’m looking forward to meeting some of you there! Here’s my abstract for What’s new in Groovy 2.0? After a quick look at the key features of Groovy 1.8, including more readable Domain-Specific Languages, concurrency capabilities with the GPars library, and built-in JSON support, we’ll dive right into the most important features of Groovy 2. Read more...

If you think Time Machine is backing up your Mac too often, you can customize the interval between two automatic scheduled backups. I found that trick on MacYourself. Open up a Terminal, and change the value, in seconds, of the interval (here 7200 seconds == 2 hours instead of the standard one hour): sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 7200 Update: This doesn’t seem to work on Mac OS X Lion, although it worked in previous versions (like Leopard). Read more...

With the recent release of Groovy 1.8.6, Groovy contributor Tim Yates, posted a few blog posts about some of the little useful enhancements that found their way in the release: Array#contains() Byte[]#encodeHex() the very useful collate() method Tim also wrote a really great and detailed blog post explaining how to contribute to the Groovy project. Be sure to check it out if you’ve always wanted to contribute to the project. Tim shows how to get started, to propose a new feature or bug fix through JIRA, how to submit a pull request through GitHub, etc. Read more...

(http://gr8conf.org/), the Groovy ecosystem conference series, are coming to Denmark and to the USA in a few months. You’ll learn about the latest novelties about tons of great Groovy-based technologies, like Groovy, Grails, Gaelyk, Gradle, GPars, Griffon, Spock, CodeNarc and more. It’s the best place to engage with the community, get to know the developers of those projects, and present your success stories, and more. If you’re willing to speak at the conference about all those topics, please head over to the GR8Conf Call for Papers. Read more...

The Groovy development team is pleased to announce the release of Groovy 1.8.6. Groovy 1.8.6 is a maintenance release essentially, with a few minor improvements and new features. You can see the details in the JIRA release notes here: http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&version=18245 You can download Groovy 1.8.6 in the Download section of the Groovy website: http://groovy.codehaus.org/Download Thanks a lot to all those who contributed to this release! Next in line should be a new beta of Groovy 2. Read more...