A week ago ended the latest edition of the Groovy & Grails eXchange 2011 conference in London, organized by the fine and lovely folks of SkillsMatter.

The organizers have a great setup which allows them to record and publish all the presentations almost live! And I’d like in this post to give you a link to each and every presentation that was given during the conference:

First day:

• Groovy 1.8, 2.0 and beyond by Guillaume Laforge
• Discobot: Groovy on Android by Erik Pragt and Marcin Erdmann
• A Gaelyk update by Guillaume Laforge
• Getting Groovy on the web and desktop by Andres Almiray
• Enterprise Gradle by Hans Dokter
• Advanced Gradle by Hans Dokter
• Painless desktop application development with Griffon by Andres Almiray
• Smarter testing with Spock by Luke Daley
• Asynchronous IO on the web with vert.x by Peter Ledbrook
• Just keep passing the messages with GPars by Russel Winder
• Powerful metaprogramming techniques with Groovy by Jeff Brown

Second day:

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Rick Hightower for InfoQ, on the features of Groovy 1.8, and also what we’re working on for Groovy 2.0.

If you’re interested, here’s the article: Latest Happenings and Future of Groovy 1.8, 2.0 and Beyond

Dierk published a gist on GitHub with a handy Gradle build script to help you bootstrap a Gradle-built project from scratch, without having to create the directory layout manually, or install the Gradle wrapper.

This is pretty neat and should be integrated in Gradle to ease the creation of projects!

I’ve updated the gist with a more recent version of Groovy and Gradle.

And so that I never forget about this handy Gradle build script, I’m blogging about it and reproducing it here, to save me precious minutes finding it again the next time I need it! So without further ado, here’s the script in question:

In a recent article, I was complaining about the new Google App Engine pricing policy. Obviously, as I have a few applications deployed on App Engine, and as I’m developing Gaelyk, a lightweight toolkit for this platform, I was worried about being heavily affected by those changes.

In this article, I’d like to do a short summary of my experience so far.

I have close to 10 applications deployed on Google App Engine. Most are just demos that nobody ever accesses. But three of them are quite important to me:

Gaelyk 1.1 has just been released!
Gaelyk is a lightweight toolkit for writing and deploying Groovy apps on Google App Engine.
In this version, all the components have been updated to their latest versions:

• Groovy 1.8.4
• GAE SDK 1.6.0

This blog is now running Gaelyk 1.1 pretty happily!
You should be able to see the announcement on the Gaelyk Google group for the details, but here’s the list of changes:

On this post on the Groovy website, we’ve announced the releases of Groovy 1.8.4 and the first beta of 2.0, as well as cover some updates on the roadmap.

In a nutshell, the big highlights are the static type checking support and invoke dynamic support. We’re also going to investigate whether it makes sense to also cover static compilation. And we’ve also announced a new version numbering scheme, to move Groovy forward.

With Google+ releasing its new “page” feature, I’ve created a page for the Groovy project on Google+. The idea is to post some regular updates on what’s going on in the Groovy project, its ecosystem, and share any interesting article that’s of interest to those using Groovy.

It’s the conference season. After JavaOne, comes SpringOne2GX, in Chicago, this week (October 25th till 28th). Then Greach in Madrid (Spain), Devoxx in Antwerp (Belgium) and we’ll finish with Groovy/Grails eXchange in London (UK).

In Chicago this week, we’ll have 4 tracks dedicated to Groovy, Grails, and the big Groovy ecosystem (Gradle, Griffon, Spock, Geb…) over three days. That’s a lot of sessions and speakers ready to tell you all about what’s rocking in our world!

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.