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. Read 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: Read more...

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. Read more...

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. Read more...

This is with great pleasure that I’m announcing the release of the first release candidate of Groovy. Groovy RC-1 is a very important milestone in the life of the project. It also means 1.0 will be released very shortly thereafter. The plan is to release the final version before the end of the month. This release contains a re-implemented and reworked Meta-Object Protocol, which is the core of Groovy’s runtime system which decides how the dispatch of method calls, property and attribute access works. Read more...

There have always been a few irritating things to me in Java. However, working on Groovy made me go beyond these limitations, or all the useless boiler-plate code one has to write. If I had to ask for some new features in Java 7, that would certainly be: have closure support (or delegate or whatever you call that) native syntax for common data structures like lists and maps named parameters Today, I’m going to say a few words about the last item on my list: named parameters. Read more...

When you’re subscribed to many mailing-lists, you often have hundreds of mails a day that you don’t even bother reading. So usually, you mark them as read. But if you’re like me and that your using tags as folders and sort all incoming mailing-lists in those folders, when you want to mark all mails as read, you need to go to each label and select them all, mark them as read each time. Read more...

A few weeks ago at JavaDay 2006, a nice one-day conference organized by Sun, I’ve had the pleasure to meet James Gosling. James is the main creator of Java, and as I’m leading the Groovy project, and that the conference was happening in Versailles, city of the former French kings reknown castle, it’s like two language kings were meeting there! The picture taken on the left is from Chris, my friend and former colleague. Read more...

Yesterday, while blogging about the latest Groovy and Grails news, I mentioned the arrival of Groovy in Action soon to be published by Manning. And I forgot to show you the beautiful cover of the book. “Groovy in Action” is mainly written by Dierk Koenig, assisted with Andrew Glover, Paul King, Jon Skeet and myself. James Gosling was kind to write us a foreword for the book, and when I met him at JavaDay 2006 two weeks ago, it was such a delight to hear him telling me that he had used Groovy in a couple of projects at Sun and that he liked it very much! Read more...

A lot of great and interesting things are happening these days on the dynamic language front. Of course, for those who’ve been there or followed the blog reports and articles, this year’s been a pretty Groovy year so far, as I had promised last year. For instance, the 6 sessions about Groovy & Grails at JavaOne 2006 were well attended and packed. But that’s not all, Groovy and Grails are present at variousevents, such as the iX conference in Germany, where Dierk Koenig and Marc Guillemot will be speaking. Read more...