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.

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. This new MOP brings more flexibility and a finer-grained control of those mechanisms. But unless you need tweaking that advanced dispatching logic, those changes won’t affect you.

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.

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. It starts to become a little boring. I’d love having a button “mark all as read” in Gmail. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The biggest pain though, is to have to go to each label’s view to mark things as read. Fortunately, I came across a nice tip to allow me to view all unread mails altogether, without having to let everything go in my inbox (which I don’t want).

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 his blog, it’s full of great content! Of course, you’ll have recognized James on the left, and me on the right… and not the reverse order ;-)

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!

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. Another great thing that happened just a few days ago was the very first Groovy and Grails seminarwhere Dierk and Graeme Rocher talked about Groovy and Grails!

Lots of things are happening to me these days. First of all, I just got married a week ago with the lovely woman I’ve been living with for a few years already. Tug, my friend & Groovy commiter came straight from England to our wedding and took some shots of Stéphanie and me. Thanks a lot to all our family and friends who were so kind to come celebrate this happy moment with us, and to all those who sent us their best wishes.

Remember Floyd Marinescu? The founder of TheServerSide? He’s now working hard on a new community news site which has just been unleashed/unlaunched: InfoQ. InfoQ is a community of communities delivering news, articles, interviews, presentations, opinions, and even mini-books on various topics targeting an audience of software and technical architects, project leads and managers. Currently, five communities (or main topics if you prefer) are available:

• Java
• .Net
• Ruby
• SOA
• Agile

What’s nice about this concept of communities is that you can very easily subscribe or browse only the content you’re interested in. Moreover, those communities are handled by some famous and reknown contributors, like Scott Ambler for the Agile section, or Obie Fernandez for the Ruby part. The personalization goes even further, because you can also select some sub-topics / tags specific like Architecture, Modeling, Domain-Specific Languages, etc. That’s an orthogonal clustering of information. And with all these nice aspects, everything is so… Web 2.0 ;-) Full of AJAX everywhere, but for the best, not just for the shiny and trendy aspect of it.

Groovy introduced the concept of builders a few years ago, and it’s great to see other dynamic languages borrow this concept. Functional languages have even already done things like that for decades! In the past, Groovy borrowed a lot of brilliant ideas to languages like Ruby or Smalltalk, and some times, that’s the reversed situation where others seem to borrow ideas from Groovy.

• JRuby created a clone of our AntBuilder
• Ruby/Rails’ve got their own Ruby builders
• And I just came across an article today showing some builders in JavaScript as well with the JavaScript DOM builder

Grails also makes heavy use of the builder concept by letting users easily create Hibernate criteria queries, define domain classes constraints, or specify AJAX XML fragments. The builder concept is really a creative way to create fluent APIs and DSLs. I’m sure we’ll find other great usage scenarios for it.