It is this time of the year: GR8Conf Europe 2011 is ready to rock the Groovy world!

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Three days packed with Groovy, Grails, Griffon, Gradle, Spock, GPars, Gaelyk, AST transformations, GContracts, Grails Plugins development, and lots of other gr8 stuff.

This year, the conference is growing. We kick of the conference with a university day, with two tracks, one intermediate and one advanced, with workshops and hands-on training:

I’m very pleased to announce the release of Gaelyk 0.6.

This new version is a pretty significant milestone, both in terms of features and quality. We’re really approaching a final 1.0 version!

Here’s a list of the novelties, updates, and bug fixes.

• Updated to GAE SDK 1.4.0 and Groovy 1.7.6
• Channel service added in the binding and added a convenient method for sending messages
• Ability to specify the “warmup request” handler through a route definition
• Added app.gaelyk.version in the binding
• Use a servlet context listener for initializing the plugin system
• Initial support for the asynchronous datastore
• Updated the task queue enhancements to use the new package (as task queues migrated from labs)
• Introduced a Gradle build script for building Gaelyk itself
• Increased the code coverage of the project to over 82%
• Added before{} request and after{} request lifecycle hooks to plugins
• Added initial Eclipse project files in the template project
• Fixed a bug with ignore URL routes which triggered NPEs after the capabilities routing was added
• Corrected typos in the tutorials

Be careful, however, as there are two breaking changes compared to previous versions:

I’m pleased to announce the release of Gaelyk 0.4.4!

What’s new?

• Updated the Google App Engine SDK to the latest 1.3.7 version
• Jabber and incoming email groovlets now have their implicit logger (gaelyk.email and gaelyk.jabber)
• Plugins are now impacting Jabber and incoming email groovlets as well
• Fixed a bug the conversion of String to Datastore’s Category type
• Internal refactorings of the caching logic
• Added namespace support for multitenancy, added in SDK 1.3.7:
  • a namespace is added in the binding, pointing at NamespaceManager, the SDK class dealing with namespaces
  • a new method namespace.of("customerA") { ... } to execute a closure in the context of a specific namespace

Although I haven’t mentioned it in the notes above (on on the download page), some of the internal refactorings of the caching and routing logic have also helped solving problems with the blobstore support. Please report back to me if it’s working as expected, for text content as well as binary content stored in blobstore (the latter was problematic in 0.4.3).

A quick heads-up to tell you about an upcoming Groovy 1.8 feature which will allow us to make nicer DSLs. This feature will be available in Groovy 1.8-beta-2, which will probably be released before JavaOne.

Lidia Donajczyk was our Google Summer of Code student this year, working on the implementation of GEP-3, an extension to Groovy’s command expressions. You can have a look at the GEP-3 page for the guiding ideas behind this enhancement proposal.

The GR8Conf is back! A conference dedicated to Groovy, Grails, Griffon, Gradle, Spock and more! This second edition of the conference takes place in Copehagen, Denmark, again like last year. And it’s solely dedicated to the Groovy Ecosystem, and all the GR8 technologies based on it.

Over two days, in a single track (to avoid missing important sessions because of too much choice), you’ll hear about:

• the Groovy dynamic language for the JVM
• the Grails web application stack based on Spring, Tomcat and Hibernate
• the Griffon swing application framework for rich desktop applications
• the Gaelyk lightweight toolkit for easily developing and deploying small applications to Google App Engine
• the Gradle build solution system
• the GPars parallel library for Groovy

And some advanced talk on:

The Groovy development team and SpringSource are very pleased to announce the final release of Groovy 1.7, the most popular and successful dynamic language for the JVM! After two betas and two release candidates, we’re are happy to deliver this new and very important milestone to our ever growing user base.

Over the years, the Groovy project has managed to grow a community, but not only that, a very rich and active ecosystem of Groovy-related projects: theGrails web stack, the Griffon swing application framework, the Gant and Gradle build solutions, the Gaelyk lightweight toolkit for Google App Engine, the Gparsparallel system, the Easyb and Spock testing frameworks and the GMock mocking library, the CodeNarc and GMetrics quality tools, and many more! With all these initiatives, the world is even groovier and we’re thankful these projects have helped us shape what Groovy is today.

Big release days!

• Yesterday, Grails 1.1.2 was pulled from the oven, while waiting for Spring 3 to be available to release 1.2.
• Today, we released Groovy 1.6.6 and 1.7-RC-1, bringing use closer to the final 1.7 release, which would take place before Christmas.
• And tonight, I’ve also updated Gaelyk 0.3.2, the lightweight Groovy toolkit for developing applications on Google App Engine. In particular, have a look at the URL routing support and the few bug fixes and also at my presentation at the Devoxx conference.

Have fun and enjoy those releases!

Following the conference-driven development principle, right in time for the Devoxx conference and my session with my friend Patrick Chanezon on Google App Engine Java and Gaelyk/Groovy, I’ve just released a new version (0.3) of the Gaelyk lightweight Groovy toolkit for Google App Engine.

This new version fixes a bug, adds some new capabilities, and bring a small change:

• The Google services bound to the Groovlets and templates through the binding have been renamed (except userService) to remove the service suffix
• There are some new methods for working with the memcache service, so you can use the map notation (subscript) to access elements of the cache, as well as using the ‘in’ keyword to check whether a key is present in the cache.
• Since GAE SDK 1.2.6, incoming email support has been added, so Gaelyk 0.3 also adds support for incoming emails.
• There was an issue since the birth of Gaelyk with sending emails, it has now been fixed.

Please make sure to check the tutorial, as it’s been updated with new sections on these changes and new features.

Gaelyk is a lightweight toolkit for developing and deploying applications on Google App Engine.

As Google recently released an updated version of their Google App Engine SDK, providing support for XMPP/Jabber messaging and Task Queues, I’ve worked on a new Gaelyk version providing support for these new features, with a Groovy touch.

Gaelyk can be downloaded here: http://gaelyk.appspot.com/download/

You can have a look at the latest tutorial updated with coverage of:

• sending / receiving XMPP/Jabber messages,
• using Task Queues,
• also an example of how to do queries on the datastore has been added. Read the tutorial here: http://gaelyk.appspot.com/tutorial/

The Gaelyk website uses that new version of Gaelyk, as well as the latest 1.2.5 SDK for Google App Engine. The Groovy Web Console will also be updated shortly to use that new version.

Time flies, soooo fast! Griffon, the Groovy MVC framework for building desktop applications, is already one year old. Developers know Groovy and Grails very well, but there are many other Groovy-based tools and frameworks, and Griffon is a very nice and successful animal of the Groovy ecosystem.

Others are already celebrating this first anniversary on twitter, as well as in the blogosphere, like some of the Griffon developers:

• Jim Shingler
• James Williams
• Andres Almiray
• Josh Reed
• Danno Ferrin

With tons of plugins, books in the writing, Griffon is really gaining a lot of momentum and mindshare!