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).

This is with great pleasure that the Groovy development team announces the joint releases of Groovy 1.8.2 and 1.9-beta-3. The big highlight of this release is the completion of the primitive type arithmetics performance optimizations. Microbenchmarks affictionados should be happy, and those wanting to do some number crunching should see better results with these improvements. Other than that, those two releases are essentially about bug fixes.

You can have a look at the release notes here: http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&version=17494

I’m quite disappointed by Google App Engine’s new pricing model.

I was aware of the changes, the upcoming prices and quotas, but I wasn’t expecting my small low-trafic apps to go beyond the free quotas, and force me to have to pay for those small Gaelyk apps!

The big problem is the cost of the “frontend instance hours”. An app running all the time, with low trafic, but enough to keep a frontend instance running all day will cost you 30 bucks a month with this new pricing policy.

If you’re in Germany, don’t miss the CamelCaseCon conference in Düsseldorf! A conference dedicated to the Groovy ecosystem: Groovy, Grails, Gradle, CodeNarc and Spock.
Dierk König, Hans Dokter, Peter Niederwieser, Joachim Bauman, Stefan Glase, will cover all these Groovy-related topics, so you’ll hear the latest news from renowned experts.

VMware released the announced CloudFoundry micro-cloud.
First, what is that micro-cloud about? From the announcement on the website:

Micro Cloud Foundry is a complete version of Cloud Foundry that runs in a virtual machine on a developer’s Mac or PC. It is a full instance of Cloud Foundry that provides the flexibility of local development while preserving your options for future deployment and scaling of your applications.

I’m quite happy that this virtualized version of the real CloudFoundry is available, as this will greatly simplify the process for developing and testing your application locally.

Today is the 8th birthday of the Groovy dynamic language project!

I hardly believe I’ve been involved with the project for almost as long! I started contributing to the project very early, but only became committer 4 months or so later. It’s been such a great fun, great ride, meeting all those great persons, and seeing the community forming around the project, and further along, the wealth of satellite projects!

There are still so many good things ahead of us, but we already have a solid, healthy, successful and popular project project, and that’s also thanks to all our users, and those who contributed in a way or another. So thanks to you all for all those great years!

I’m very happy to announce the final release of Gaelyk 1.0, the lightweight Groovy toolkit for Google App Engine!
It took some time to get to 1.0, but it’s now here, with the key feature I’ve been missing since the beginning of the project, in particular the Query DSL which allows you to write queries like this one:

def latestArticles = datastore.execute {  
    select all from articles  
    sort desc by dateCreated  
    where author == params.author  
    limit 10  
}

If you want to learn more about this lightweight framework, head over to: http://gaelyk.appspot.com/
You can learn everything through the tutorial.

It was time I rebooted my old blog! It used to be in PHP, and it’s time to move to the next millenium with a blog engine written in Groovy, using the Gaelyk lightweight toolkit, and deployed on Google App Engine.

The Groovy development team is really pleased and proud to announce the release of the final version of Groovy 1.8.0!

After a lot of work and efforts throughout four betas and four release candidates, version 1.8 of Groovy has been long in the making, but is packed with tons of new features and enhancements, for your productivity, and your pleasure. In particular, you’ll be happy to learn about:

• the new Domain-Specific Language authoring capabilities for more readability and expressivity of your business rules,
• the runtime performance improvements,
• the bundling of the GPars parallel and concurrency library,
• the built-in JSON support,
• the new compile-time meta-programming features (several new useful AST transformations),
• the new functional programming aspects of closures,
• and much more.

To get all the details, with code samples, we have prepared an in-depth release notes document. Please have a look at it to learn more about the features listed above, and discover other smaller enhancements as well.