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. Read more...

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. Read more...

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. Read more...

After my interview back in august 2005, I’m happy to let you know about my latest interview I’ve just made for IndicThreads. In this interview, I’m speaking of course about Groovy and Grails, our innovative and advanced web framework lead by Graeme Rocher.

Scripting is definitely in fashion these days on the Java Virtual Machine. The JavaOne 2006 session catalog is online, and by browsing it, you’ll notice there are several sessions and BOFs dedicated to scripting. By simply searching for the word “scripting” in the content catalog viewer, you’ll count no less than 13 sessions speaking about scripting. This will be my first time at JavaOne. And a big first time since I’ll be presenting a session! Read more...

As a gift for mentoring students for the Google summer of code 2005 around some project ideas for Groovy, I just received a nice tshirt roughly on time for Christmas!

There are often some issues that can waste several hours of your precious time: XML parser incompatibilities depending on your platform and application, i18n problems where several elements of your architecture aren’t configured well to serve correct encoded and localized content, class loader hierarchy nightmares, or even Jar Hell when different libraries you depend on require different versions of the same jar. Today, I’m going to concentrate on the first problem: XML parser issues. Read more...

I’ve just come across a clone of Groovy’s AntBuilder. It’s being built with JRuby and allows you to write your build scripts in JRuby by reusing Ant’s tasks. That was a pleasure to see Ruby inspired by our concept of builders, and now, they also copy our own builders. I’d simply say that imitation is the best form of flattery. Kudos guys!

Last week took place the second GroovyOne meeting in Paris, gathering the main Groovy developers. The event went fairly well, despite some disagreement we need to iron out, we made quite a lot ofprogress on the Groovy front towards 1.0. It’s been a real pleasure to meet together again, and I must say I really had a lot of fun there. But this meeting could not have been possible without the help and sponsoring of different actors. Read more...

My friend Christopher just told me a very old bug in the JDK has eventually been fixed in Mustang! UTF-8 encoding does not recognize initial BOM Java does not recognize the optional BOM which can begin a UTF-8 stream. It treats the BOM as if it were the initial character of the stream.A Utf-8 stream can optionally beign with a byte order mark (see, for example http://www.unicode.org.unicode/faq/utf_bom.html). This is the character FEFF, which is represented as EF BB BF in utf-8. Read more...