The Groovy development team has just released Groovy 1.8.3 and 1.9-beta-4.

For the impatients:

• download it on the Groovy download page
• check the JIRA release notes for 1.8.3 and 1.9-beta-4
• or read the official announcement

Those two releases are essentially about bug fixes and minor enhancements, but we also have interesting developments going on for static type checking your Groovy code, and for invoke dynamic support for performance of our dynamic core. But it’ll be better that I save those topics for some future posts!

Google announces Dart, at the Goto Conference: a new programming language for “structured web programming”, for building web applications. Google also launched the Dart website, where you can read about the rationale of the language, the specification, and play with some live examples.

The team behind Dart

Reknown engineers Lars Bak and Gilad Bracha are on stage to present the language. Lars Bak worked on many virtual machines like Sun’s HotSpot or more recently Google V8, whereas Gilad Bracha is also famous for his work on the Java specification, his Smalltalk background, and the creation of a recent language called Newspeak (a flavour of Smalltalk). So with such a team of VM and language experts, you can expect some interesting outcome.

The now famous GR8Conf conference dedicated to all things Groovy, is now coming to Australia, as announced on the GR8Conf blog! It will take place in Canberra, side by side with the Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC), on November 15th.

The GR8Conf Australia website is already up and is running a Call for Papers. So if you have a presentation on Groovy, Grails, Griffon, Gradle, Spock, CodeNarc, Gaelyk, etc, with introductions, deep dives, case studies, and so on, feel free to submit a talk!

Groovy is a powerful language that gives the opportunity to its users to plugin into the compilation process to create what we call AST transformations, ie. the ability to customize the Abstract Syntax Tree representing your programs before the compiler walks this tree to generate Java bytecode.

Since Groovy 1.6, many useful such transformations have been added to Groovy, like @Delegate to implement delegation, @Immutable to make your types immutable, or @Grab to add dependencies to your scripts, and many more. However, mastering the Groovy AST and compiler APIs is not such a simple task, and requires some advanced knowledge of the inner workings of Groovy.

The Gradle project is moving quickly towards its final version and we hear more and more projects adopting or migrating to Gradle for their build and project automation. Gradle founder Hans Dokter pushed very interesting posts those past days:

• On our way to Gradle 1.0: where he explains the current features being worked on before being able to reach 1.0, with a strong focus on three key aspects: the new dependency cache, the daemon, and performance improvements.
• In Welcome to the new Gradle dependency cache, Hans details the current critical issues that all other build systems face with the non-reproducability of their builds due to the poor design of the current dependency cache solutions, and then goes on to explain how Gradle’s new solution solves all these problems in an elegant way.

Last but not least, you should also check out the “week in Gradle” column, which will give you the latest news on everything Gradle every week, starting this week, covering the interesting project development, job offerings, appearance at conferences, tweets, articles, and more.

Groovy completed successfully its move to the Git SCM this summer, thanks to Matthew’s help. For helping everybody get up-to-speed with Git, I’ve added a page about Git on the Groovy wiki.

We also now have a “groovy” organization on GitHub: https://github.com/groovy/groovy-core

Our three main branches have been pushed there: master, GROOVY_1_8_X and GROOVY_1_7_X. But I’ve not pushed the tags though.

The GitHub repository serves as a mirror, and the Groovy despots will be able to regularly push the latest changes to GitHub, and deal with pull requests and such.

As soon as I heard about the opening of the Google+ APIs, letting us access public posts in our Google+ streams, I wanted to play with them, and integrate my posts in my social stream on my blog.

First of all, a little screenshot, where you’ll see the Google+ item at the bottom:

Now, a bit of code? Yeah, of course. First of all, you’ll need to follow the explanations of the Google+ API portal to get your own API key (I’ll hide mine in this example so you don’t use mine). Then, it’s really just a handful lines of Groovy code to get the integration goin, thanks to Groovy’s Json support.

I’ve just come across eWeek’s latest article on programming languages trends, and they announce that Groovy is the fastest growing language!

The data shows the percentage of jobs that have increased (or decreased) for various programming languages since November 2009. In the time frame this slide show depicts, Groovy saw the largest increase in jobs, followed by C# and—surprisingly—COBOL.

Of course, we still have a lot of work to do to continue growing, and stay the most popular and successful alternative language for the JVM, but it’s great to see such confirmations on a famous online business journal.

In my feed reader, I came across this nice image showing the many ways to lace your shoes!
I selected one of those that I’d like to try some day, it’s very nice looking:

I think I’ve been using essentially the 4th and 7th for years.

Which lacing scheme do you use?

Update: There are even sites dedicated to shoe lacing!

In the coming months, the Groovy team will be working on a nicer website with a web designer and better and up-to-date documentation. Obviously, this will take quite some time (especially for the content, more than for the look), but in the meantime, I wanted to refresh the look of the Groovy website a bit. So I spent several hours today and tonight playing with CSS3!

I used Twitter’s Bootstrap grid system which is quite neat. Not only does it provides an easy to use grid system, but it also takes care of typography, menus, and much more. And I used highlight.js for the Groovy syntax highlighting (the same that I use on this blog).