This is with great pleasure that G2One and the Groovy development team announce the first beta of Groovy 1.6.

Beyond the 73 bug fixes and 24 improvements listed in the release notes above, the main focus was on performance improvements.

Compilation and runtime performance improvements

As you may have already noticed with Groovy 1.5.5, the compiler is 3 to 5 times fasterthan in previous releases. This improvement is available both in this development version and in the 1.5.x stable branch. Thanks to class lookup caches, the bigger the project, the faster the compilation will be.

If you’re going to JavaOne this year, and if you’re interested in Groovy and Grails, you can’t miss G2One’s free Groovy / Grails meetup, Monday evening, 7pm, at the W Hotel, across the street from Moscone.

It’s going to be a great opportunity to meet the guys behind both Groovy and Grails, learn about the latest news about these projects, see some cool demos, and hear about customers who’ve decided to use Grails in their projects. You’ll be able to also get great Groovy books signed by authors Venkat Subramaniam and Scott Davis.

This week takes place the 2008 JAX conference, in Germany. Last year, Groovy won the first prize of the JAX innovation award, and this year, Grails was submitted and has just been nominated by the jury.Guillaume Laforge, Groovy project lead and initiator of the Grails project, will be at JAX this week and will represent the Grails team and project.

From the nomination announcement:

Now it is official: The ten nominees for the JAX Innovation Award. The winners of the award are kept top secret and will be made public next week at the JAX. The award, which is endowed with price money of 20,000 Euro altogether, originated from an initiative of the Software & Support publishing company.

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G2One, Inc. and the Groovy development team are pleased to announce the release of Groovy 1.5.5, a bug fix release of the 1.5.x stable branch.

Beyond all the bug fixes and consistency improvements, the major aspect of this release is certainly the improvements in compilation speed. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve the performance of Groovy, we have worked hard on compilation speed, and we backported those improvements from the upcoming Groovy 1.6, to ensure that all users using stable versions of Groovy can benefit from these performance increases. The Groovyc compiler should now be from 3 to 5 times faster, which will make big Groovy / Java and Grails projects much snappier to compile.

Sun engineer Matthias Schmidt has just published an article on the progress of the Groovy and Grails support in NetBeans. The Aquarium also features the ongoing work on support of Grails in Glassfish.

On NetBeans front, Matthias Schmidt and Martin Adamek started working on a plugin back in November. You’ll need to use a NetBeans nightly build, and download the Groovy/Grails plugin from the updace center. The plugin already provides:

• Method-completion including JavaDoc display for Groovy and Java
• Code Folding of Groovy source files
• Starting, stopping of the Grails server
• Importing existing Grails projects with a week arranged display of project structure
• Groovy/Grails module settings integrated into NetBeans options dialog
• Marking of source code errors
• Easy navigation of Groovy source code by using a navigator view
• Customizing of Grails environment and server port
• Auto-deploy to the Glassfish application server
• Starting common Grails tasks from context menu
• Status of running Grails server displayed in status-line
• Syntax highlighting

This is a promising beginning, but there’s definitely more to come:

On Ajaxian, the other day, I spotted an article about JSON.Net, a project aiming at simplifying the production and consumption of JSON data for the .Net world, and I wanted to contrast what I’ve read with what we are doing with Groovy and Grails. I rarely speak about the Microsoft world, but the latest features of C# 3 are very interesting and powerful, particularly the anonymous types, their closures (whatever they are called), and LINQ for querying relational or tree structured data.

Domain-Specific Languages are a hot topic, and have been popularized by languages like Groovy and Ruby thanks to their malleable syntax which make them a great fit for this purpose. In particular, Groovy allows you to create internal DSLs: business languages hosted by Groovy. In a recent research work, Tiago Antão has decided to use Groovy to model the resistance to drugs against the Malaria disease. In two blog posts, Tiago explains some of the tactics he used, and how to put them together to create a mini-language for health related studies. In this work, he needed to represent quantities of medecine, like 300 miligram of Chloroquinine, a drug used against Malaria. Groovy lets you add properties to numbers, and you can represent such quantities with just 300.mg. Inspired by this idea, the purpose of this article is to examine how to build a mini-DSL for manipulating measures and units by leveraging the JScience library.

At JavaPolis ‘07, Dick Wall and Carl Quinn of JavaPosse fame have interviewed Guillaume Laforge, the Groovy project manager, and asked him about:

• the latest release of Groovy 1.5 and its novelties,
• more details on the come back of the ‘infamous’ for loop,
• the support of generics,
• the inclusion of closures in Java compared to Groovy’s closures,
• what Grails is and why it matters,
• how simple it is to leverage Grails in IT’s today infrastructure,
• the first class support of SQL and XML in Groovy,
• and also what the future will hold in the upcoming Groovy releases.

Go and view the interview on Parleys.com.

If you want to learn everything about Groovy and Grails, get in touch with all the projects committers and contributors, and have a great time, you should definitely not miss the Groovy / Grails Experience that will take place in Reston, VA, USA – February 21 - 23, 2008

There’s a pretty impressive list of speakers, and the session schedule looks pretty tasty. It’s the best opportunity to get the right information straight from the horse’s mouth. A lot of topics will be covered, ranging from introductions to Groovy / Grails up to more advanced topics like DSLs, design patterns in dynamic languages, Java integration, Swing UIs, GORM, and more.

It’s funny, but before working on the Groovy project, there was a song I’ve always liked: A Groovy Kind of Love, by Phill Collins. Do you think it was premonitory? That I’d work on Groovy? And speaking of Groovy love… I’ve come across some nice love messages towards Groovy that I wanted to share with you.

Jorge Lugo, a software engineer in the Washington DC area, sums up pretty well the appeal Groovy has to Java developers: