I’m pleased to announce here the organization of a European conference dedicated to Groovy, Grails and Griffon:GR8 Conference — Copenhagen — May 2009

The GR8 Conference is an affordable two-day conference taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark, on May 18th and 19th 2009, organized by Javagruppen(Danish JUG) and SpringSource, dedicated to the Groovy dynamic language, the Grails web framework, the Griffon Swing framework, and other great technologies — hence the pun and code name GR8.

There’s always a lot of activity around Groovy and Groovy-related technologies, but these days, it’s pretty hot!

First of all, InfoQ released my “What’s new in Groovy 1.6?” article going in depth into all the new features of Groovy 1.6, with explanations and code samples. Please vote for it on DZone (Guerilla Marketing rulezzz)

If you want to attend a Groovy / Grails / Griffon dedicated conference, you should definitely go to the GR8 Conference, in Copenhagen, Denmark, in May. It’s going to rock, with star speakers, hands-on sessions, several interesting benefits in the attendee package, and more. Check it out!

Groovy is a very successful and powerful dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine that provides seamless integration with Java, and has its roots firmly planted in Java itself for the syntax and APIs and other languages such as Smalltalk, Python or Ruby for its dynamic capabilities.

Groovy is used in many Open Source projects such as Grails, Spring, JBoss Seam and more, as well as integrated in commercial products and Fortune 500 mission-critical applications for its scripting capabilities offering a nice extension mechanism to these applications, or for its ability to let subject matter experts and developers author embedded Domain-Specific Languages to express business concepts in a readable and maintainable fashion.

This is with very great pleasure and honor that I’m announcing the final release of Groovy 1.6, on behalf of the Groovy development team and SpringSource.
Obviously, 1.6 is a very important milestone for the project, with several great new features and improvements:

• great runtime performance improvements
• multiple assignments
• optional return in if/else and try/catch blocks
• AST transformations and all the provided transformation annotations like @Singleton, @Lazy, @Immutable, @Delegate and friends
• the Grape module and dependency system and its @Grab transformation
• various Swing builder improvements, thanks to the Swing / Griffon (http://griffon.codehaus.org) team
• as well as several Swing console improvements
• the integration of JMX builder
• JSR-223 scripting engine built-in
• various metaprogramming improvements, like the EMC DSL, per-instance metaclasses even for POJOs, and runtime mixins

An article will be published in the coming days on InfoQ and GroovyMag coming back on all those features and novelties with more details.

The Groovy development team and SpringSource are pleased to announce the second candidate for Groovy 1.6.
This release is a bug fix release, and as you can see by looking at the JIRA issues closed (almost a hundred), a lot of work has been done to ensure that our next major release is of great quality, and various improvements have been introduced – check for instance the much nicer and thourough output of GroovyDoc!

The Groovy development team and SpringSource are happy to announce the release of the first release candidate of Groovy 1.6.

The JIRA report for this new version lists 74 bug tickets, 26 improvements and 8 new features:
http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&styleName=Html&version=14009

Among the bugs being fixed, we tackled issues about:

• the compiler
• bytecode errors
• varargs handling
• covariant returns
• Windows startup scripts

As well as a few regressions:

• the args variable not bound in Groovy scripts
• a performance regression in MarkupBuilder
• a problem with DOMCategory which was particularly problematic for Grails

Fixes in line error reporting should be handy for IDE vendors, as well as for Cobertura code coverage.
Compatibility with Java has also been improved slightly, for instance the empty for(;;) {} loop wasn’t behaving the same as in Java (no loop, instead of an infinite loop).

I’m very pleased to echo, here on my blog, the announcement of the acquisition of G2One, the Groovy/Grails company I co-founded, by SpringSource, the company behind the Spring framework!

Everybody knows Spring and SpringSource already, its wealth of Enterprise projects, and how it quickly became the de facto Enterprise standard for building mission-critical applications. Both Groovy and Grails will bring more dynamicity and agility to the Spring portofolio projects, thanks to tighter integration, cross-polination, and further extensibility. At the same time, the two G’s will most probably bring a fun coolness factor into the mix, like the icing on the cake!

I’m really sad to hear the report Kirill makes on Sun progressively abandonning Swing (also posted on java.net).

Swing is really a very good framework for building rich client applications, and from what I’ve heard and seen, it’s even better than what exists in the .Net world, or compared to things like SWT or Cocoa. Sun is leaving a gem in the cold to bet everything on a half-backed JavaFX technology.

With the focus on JavaFX, Sun progressively lost all its key talented employees who preferred sailing to more gorgeous seas – I can’t blame them for that. With the new app framework, the timing framework, SwingLabs, painters, new look’n feels, a wealth of OSS and commercial components, Swing had great chances to keep up with the rest of the world, and even keep its bleeding edge and stay ahead of the curve. Alas, Swing is dying in favor of a new technology nobody cares about – why would one use JavaFX when Adobe’s Flex and Microsoft’s Silverlight are so much more advanced and ready for prime-time, thought and tool’ed for the designer in mind?

I’m very happy to echo the release of the first issue of GroovyMag, the Groovy and Grails magazine! This is an electronic PDF magazine which will bring you news, articles and tutorials around the Groovy dynamic language for the JVM and the Grails agile web application framework.

As the site shows:

GroovyMag covers a wide variety of topics in the Groovy and Grails world, featuring some of the best and brightest names in the Groovosphere. Our first issue includes a Grails tutorial, a Groovy/Swing tutorial, community news and more.

Read more...

This is with great pleasure that the Groovy development team and G2One announce the joint release of both Groovy 1.5.7 – current stable and maintenance branch – and Groovy 1.6-beta-2 – the upcoming major release.

Groovy 1.5.7 contains mainly bug fixes (61 bug fixes), but also some minor API improvements (20 improvements) backported from the1.6 branch, whereas Groovy 1.6-beta-2 brings a wealth of novelty (68 bug fixes and 38 improvements and new features). Here, we’ll mainly cover the new features of beta-2.