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.

The now famous GR8Conf conference dedicated to all things Groovy, is now coming to Australia, as announced on the GR8Conf blog! It will take place in Canberra, side by side with the Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC), on November 15th.

The GR8Conf Australia website is already up and is running a Call for Papers. So if you have a presentation on Groovy, Grails, Griffon, Gradle, Spock, CodeNarc, Gaelyk, etc, with introductions, deep dives, case studies, and so on, feel free to submit a talk!

Groovy is a powerful language that gives the opportunity to its users to plugin into the compilation process to create what we call AST transformations, ie. the ability to customize the Abstract Syntax Tree representing your programs before the compiler walks this tree to generate Java bytecode.

Since Groovy 1.6, many useful such transformations have been added to Groovy, like @Delegate to implement delegation, @Immutable to make your types immutable, or @Grab to add dependencies to your scripts, and many more. However, mastering the Groovy AST and compiler APIs is not such a simple task, and requires some advanced knowledge of the inner workings of Groovy.

The Gradle project is moving quickly towards its final version and we hear more and more projects adopting or migrating to Gradle for their build and project automation. Gradle founder Hans Dokter pushed very interesting posts those past days:

• On our way to Gradle 1.0: where he explains the current features being worked on before being able to reach 1.0, with a strong focus on three key aspects: the new dependency cache, the daemon, and performance improvements.
• In Welcome to the new Gradle dependency cache, Hans details the current critical issues that all other build systems face with the non-reproducability of their builds due to the poor design of the current dependency cache solutions, and then goes on to explain how Gradle’s new solution solves all these problems in an elegant way.

Last but not least, you should also check out the “week in Gradle” column, which will give you the latest news on everything Gradle every week, starting this week, covering the interesting project development, job offerings, appearance at conferences, tweets, articles, and more.