After Groovy was awarded the first prize of the JAX conference in Germany last week for being the most innovative and creative project in 2007 in the Java community, we’re pleased to announce therelease of Groovy 1.1-beta-1.

This release is the first beta release after the release of Groovy 1.0. But it’s a very important release as we’ve been working on key features putting Groovy clearly as the de facto enterprise scripting solution. Indeed, Groovy is now the first and sole alternative language for the JVM that supports Java 5 annotations. Groovy 1.1-beta-1 also supports Java 5 static imports.

After Groovy won the JAX 2007 innovation award, I took some time to look at what was going on in the blogosphere. There’s always a lot of activity in the Groovy-sphere. It never ceases to amaze me how prolific the community is. Let’s list some of the interesting posts I’ve come across this week-end.

• Chanwit managed to make Groovy run on .Net! This is pretty cool IMHO. He used IKVM for that. You’ll have to try it out.
• Alex shows how to use the native Groovy mocks to mock properties.
• Andres has created a special Groovy applet to let you write Groovy code in your script tags in your HTML pages!
• Glen is having fun with Scriptom (Groovy COM/ActiveX module) to synchronize his Remember the Milk todo list, with Outlook.
• Danno is comparing the upcoming Java closure notation with Groovy’s closure notation. I’m sure you’ll easily know which one is the sexiest and how a language that supports weak typing can be more concise and expressive.
• Warner experiments with Higher-Order Messaging with a Groovy implementation.

Next week should be pretty interesting too as we’re going to release the first beta of Groovy 1.1 in time just before JavaOne where there will be a lot of sessions dedicated to Groovy and Grails. Groovy will be the first alternative language for the JVM to support some Java 5 features. Groovy 1.1 supports annotations and static imports. If you plan to use another language than Java and leverage other key frameworks using annotations like Spring, EJB 3 / JPA, TestNG or Guice, your best option will be Groovy as it will be the sole alternative language supporting those frameworks.

JAX is the most important Java conference in Germany. Every year, the organizers are running a contest to select the most innovative and creative projects. Fromover 40 proposals, the jury selected only ten nominees. Although great projects were selected, like the Matisse GUI builder in NetBeans, or the Nuxeo Enterprise Content Management solution, Groovy won the first prize! It is a great honor and a huge pleasure for us to receive such a prize, especially knowing the cool projects we were competing with, or the past winners like the Spring framework.

I recently came across Bob Lee’s brand new IoC/DI framework: Guice. I’m usually using Spring for that purpose, and also because it goes much farther than just IoC/DI, but I thought I’d give Guice a try, especially because I wanted to play with Groovy’s support for annotations. So I downloaded Guice, and read the nice getting starteddocumentation I also took a snapshot of Groovy 1.1 that supports Java 5 annotations. With guice-1.0.jar and aopalliance.jar on my classpath, and with the latest Groovy snapshot distribution properly installed, I was ready to go!

As always, lots of great things are happening in the Groovy and Grails community. If you’d like to stay up-to-date with the news, but if you don’t want to spend the whole day reading our high-traffic mailing-lists, you should certainly consider subscribing to one of these two resources:

• AboutGroovy: The community portal news site about everything Groovy and Grails, with frequent news items, podcast interviews, pointers to important resources.
• GroovyBlogs: A JavaBlog-like news agregator agregating the Grooyv and Grails mailing-lists feeds, and many feeds from famous bloggers spreading the Groovy and Grails love.

Both of these resources have been developed in Grails! GroovyBlogs has even been developed in under 24 hours by Glen Smith!

Scott Hickey, the project lead of the Groovy Eclipse plugin has just announced the availability of the plugin which now uses the offcial Groovy 1.0 release. The details of the announcement are reproduced below. There’s even some **basic code completion **available!

Recently, EclipseZone proposed a Getting Started article explaining the basic usage of the Groovy plugin.

There is a new version of the Groovy Eclipse Plugin available on the update site. For installation instructions, please see the wiki page http://groovy.codehaus.org/Eclipse+Plugin.

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The Groovy developer team and myself are proud and delighted to announce the final release of Groovy 1.0.

Groovy is a dynamic language for the JVM that integrates seamlessly with the Java platform.
It offers a Java-like syntax, with language features inspired by Smalltalk, Python or Ruby, and lets your reuse all your Java libraries and protect the investment you made in Java skills, tools or application servers.
Groovy can be used for various purposes, from adhoc shell scripting leveraging Java APIs, to full-blown web applications built on Spring and Hibernate through the Grails web framework.
It can also be integrated very easily in your applications to externalize business logic, create Domain-Specific Languages, or to provide templating capabilities, and much more.

The news is on the streets, on eWeek: Groovy gets funding for its development, thanks to Big Sky hiring the most prolific Groovy commiter: Jochen Theodorou. Big Sky is the company behind the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium tour and for their 2007 tour, they will offer a dedicated Groovy and Grails track!

InfoQ also features a nice article with Jay Zimmerman and Jochen Theodorou’s interviews.

In the press release, Jay Zimmerman, the founder of Big Sky had this to say:

All about Groovy and Grails on a dedicated community news site! Soon to be launched!

Yes, you read it. There’s going to be a site devoted to everything Groovy and Grails! The news is unleashed, on the streets. At the time of this writing, the site isn’t up yet, but there’s a countdown telling us there’s still 1 day and 16 hours left before http://aboutgroovy.com is open. It will be online just before the start of the Spring Experience conference taking place in Hollywood, Florida. I’ll be speaking there by the way: I’ll be presenting Grails and along with Rod Johnson, we’ll explain how integrating Spring and Groovy together.

InfoQ, the wonderful news site that tracks innovation and change in the enterprise community, has just covered the release of Groovy RC-1. Scott Delap, one of InfoQ’s editors, also seized the opportunity tointerview myself about this release, the situation of the project, present and future.

The Groovy dynamic language and its Grails web framework based on proven and scalable OSS components face a nice success in situations where language expressivity matters, and where rapid development time and compatibility with the Java platform are key to answering customers needs. Groovy and Grails are used for applications ranging from risk computation for insurance companies to Grid Computing solutions for aerospace companies.