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.

Read more...

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.

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 ;-)