If you’re under Windows, and that you need to do some shell scripting with ActiveX/COM components, Scriptom will certainly help you. Today, my boss just asked me if we could use Scriptom to convert a Word document into an HTML equivalent. And I decided to see if that was possible. To my delight, my little Scriptom module, backed by Jacob, helped me solve this integration problem with only 6 lines of Groovy code! Read more...

Qui dit nouveau boulot, dit être bien habillé. Il faut être classe et élégant. Evidemment, il n’y a pas que le premier jour qu’il faut l’être ! Mais c’est l’occasion de réviser ses classiques, et je pense particulièrement au noeud de cravate. J’ai une ribambelle de cravates dont les noeuds sont déjà faits. Je n’ai pas besoin de les refaire. Sauf si vraiment je ne suis pas satisfait du résultat. Mais en l’occurence, pour un nouveau costume, avec une nouvelle chemise, j’ai aussi opté pour une nouvelle cravate. Read more...

First of all, I wish a Happy New Year to all my readers! The first days of a new year are often days of recollection, where we look back at the previous year. What happened? Was it a good year? Did we succeed in our endeavours? Any downside or missed target? Etc… Today, I want to give you some insight in the Groovy history, as it was written last year, in 2004. Read more...

During my three weeks break before my next job, I decided I’d work on two things: first, I’ll play with Groovy a little more (playing != fixing bugs like mad like those last two months to get beta-8 out in the wild), and I’ll work on my “Learning Groovy” book for O’Reilly. In this blog post, I’ll talk about my last two days playing with Groovy and… Jacob, a Java COM Bridge library developed by Dan Adler, to interact with Windows components. Read more...

Kjetil JD submitted a feature request on JetBrains’ tracker for adding Groovy support to IntelliJ: Integrated Groovy-support Integrated support for Java bytecode-based scripting languages should be better integrated in IntelliJ. Groovy is the only Java bytecode scripting language that has a backing JSR and should be the first to be implemented with proper support like Java and XML has. For the moment, the Groovy IntelliJ plugin is somewhat stalled, we didn’t make any progress on that front, so a little help from our JetBrains friends would be most welcome. Read more...

So far, I didn’t blog about our first ever Groovy Conference we held on November 11th and November 12th. But at least, here are some pictures taken there. I’ve created a Flickr account and put my pictures son it. Jeremy Rayner blogged about the conference, and also took some pictures, and wrote down a few notes about the conference.

Everyday, when you work with your team mates, you exchange information through different communication channels. If you work in the same offices, you can simply speak and make stand-up meetings. If you work with different teams spread across different places, different buildings, or even different countries–especially true for Open Source projects–you can pick up your (Skype) phone, and write emails, or chat through instant messenging or IRC. But sometimes, it feels a bit frustrating to use those archaic mediums. Read more...

JetBrains, JetBrains… You all know I love that company, and I love their products. Especially IntelliJ that I’ve using for a few years already as my main and primary Java IDE. That really, really rocks. And you’ve probably seen the picture of me wearing my JetBrains TShirt… So what’s the news today? JetBrains’s just released their OnBoard monthly online magazine. That’s worth a read! The featured articles are: Language Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm Applying Code Generation Approach in Fabrique IntelliJ IDEA: Structural Search and Replace, What, Why and How-to Extending Omea with New Resource Types Of particular interest, Sergey Dmitriev’s–long awaited for those in the know–article about Meta-programming: “Language Oriented Programming”. Read more...

A few months ago, O’Reilly contacted the Codehaus to find some Groovy experts for writing a book about Groovy, the scripting language for the JVM. I was very interested in writing such a book, and I asked another expert, Chris Poirier, if he’d fancy co-authoring the book with me, and he accepted. That’s how we started writing “Learning Groovy”, in the famous animals/learning series. This article is not about how to become an author, but rather, how O’Reilly helps you get up to speed with the task. Read more...

Ever had to work collaboratively, concurrently on the same document in real-time? So far, the offering for dealing with collaborative documents authoring is rather oriented towards an asynchronous mode. You have Microsoft Word which allows you to make revisions, changes, highlights. You can use the good old email system by sending mails in a ping-pong way (no concurrent modifications allowed). You may also use a versioning system such as CVS or Subversion to edit documents in parallel and merge both work copies. Read more...