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.

Read more...

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).

The Groovy development team is very pleased to announce the release of Groovy 2.0, the highly popular dynamic language for the Java platform.

For the key highlights of this important milestone, Groovy 2.0 comes packed with:

• a static type checker to let the compiler tell you about the correctness of your code,
• static compilation for the performance of the critical parts of your application,
• modularity, splitting the Groovy JAR into smaller feature-oriented JARs and letting you create your own extension modules,
• JDK 7 Project Coin syntax enhancements, so that Groovy is still as friendly as possible with its Java cousin,
• and JDK 7 Invoke Dynamic integration to benefit from the support of the JVM for dynamic languages.

To learn more about all those great key new features, please read the Groovy 2.0 article on InfoQ that I’ve written, detailing and explaining all those novelties.

Along with the release of Gaelyk 1.2, I’d like to share two interesting links about running functional tests with Geb, and concurrency / parallelism with GPars on Gaelyk.
Gaelyk functional testing with Geb

In the Groovy ecosystem, we’re all aware of the Spock testing framework. On top of Spock, you can use the Geb browser automation library, to easily create functional tests for your web applications, in a nice, readable and expressive fashion.

This is with great pleasure that the development team announces the release candidate of Groovy 2.0.

For the impatient among you, you can download Groovy 2.0 RC-1 in the download area of the Groovy website. And read the JIRA changelog.

The big change in this release candidate is the modularity aspect. We’ve now fully switched to Gradle, as our build tool, to build a more modular Groovy. You still have a big “all” JAR, but if you’re interested in just picking the core JAR and the needed modules for your project, you can now do so.