On Ajaxian, the other day, I spotted an article about JSON.Net, a project aiming at simplifying the production and consumption of JSON data for the .Net world, and I wanted to contrast what I’ve read with what we are doing with Groovy and Grails. I rarely speak about the Microsoft world, but the latest features of C# 3 are very interesting and powerful, particularly the anonymous types, their closures (whatever they are called), and LINQ for querying relational or tree structured data.

Domain-Specific Languages are a hot topic, and have been popularized by languages like Groovy and Ruby thanks to their malleable syntax which make them a great fit for this purpose. In particular, Groovy allows you to create internal DSLs: business languages hosted by Groovy. In a recent research work, Tiago Antão has decided to use Groovy to model the resistance to drugs against the Malaria disease. In two blog posts, Tiago explains some of the tactics he used, and how to put them together to create a mini-language for health related studies. In this work, he needed to represent quantities of medecine, like 300 miligram of Chloroquinine, a drug used against Malaria. Groovy lets you add properties to numbers, and you can represent such quantities with just 300.mg. Inspired by this idea, the purpose of this article is to examine how to build a mini-DSL for manipulating measures and units by leveraging the JScience library.

At JavaPolis ‘07, Dick Wall and Carl Quinn of JavaPosse fame have interviewed Guillaume Laforge, the Groovy project manager, and asked him about:

• the latest release of Groovy 1.5 and its novelties,
• more details on the come back of the ‘infamous’ for loop,
• the support of generics,
• the inclusion of closures in Java compared to Groovy’s closures,
• what Grails is and why it matters,
• how simple it is to leverage Grails in IT’s today infrastructure,
• the first class support of SQL and XML in Groovy,
• and also what the future will hold in the upcoming Groovy releases.

Go and view the interview on Parleys.com.

If you want to learn everything about Groovy and Grails, get in touch with all the projects committers and contributors, and have a great time, you should definitely not miss the Groovy / Grails Experience that will take place in Reston, VA, USA – February 21 - 23, 2008

There’s a pretty impressive list of speakers, and the session schedule looks pretty tasty. It’s the best opportunity to get the right information straight from the horse’s mouth. A lot of topics will be covered, ranging from introductions to Groovy / Grails up to more advanced topics like DSLs, design patterns in dynamic languages, Java integration, Swing UIs, GORM, and more.

It’s funny, but before working on the Groovy project, there was a song I’ve always liked: A Groovy Kind of Love, by Phill Collins. Do you think it was premonitory? That I’d work on Groovy? And speaking of Groovy love… I’ve come across some nice love messages towards Groovy that I wanted to share with you.

Jorge Lugo, a software engineer in the Washington DC area, sums up pretty well the appeal Groovy has to Java developers:

A new source of information on Groovy and Grails has just been launched: the Groovy Zone. Rick Ross et al. have built upon the DZone community-driven linkblog, and JavaLobby, to create various “Zones” on numerous topics like Java, AJAX, CSS, and also Groovy and Grails. Andres Almiray, Steven Devijver and myself have become “zone leaders”, to shepherd the Groovy and Grails content.

We had AboutGroovy where Scott Davis lists on the interesting news in the Groovy and Grails spheres, and Glen Smith’sGroovyBlogs blog aggrgator listing several super interesting blogs related to Groovy and Grails… and now we have the GroovyZone!

Jason Hunter from MarkLogic (and JDOM fame) has crawled the Groovy mailing-lists archives with his gorgeous MarkMail interface.

Not all the archives have been indexed so far, as we’re still missing some older archives from before April 2004, but there’s already about 70K messages loaded. In the following screenshot, you can see the number of messages sent to the lists per month, across the course of time.

An interesting remark: you’ll certainly have noticed the jump in the traffic around January 2007. It coincides with the release of Groovy 1.0, our first official final and stable release, after years of betas. Almost overnight (or “over-month” shall I say), the traffic on the lists doubled!

Graeme pointed me at a white-paperish article claiming Groovy would not be Enterprise-ready. If the article had been acurate, I would have welcomed it, and we could have found ways to improve Groovy to make it ready, but unfortunately, the author did not do his job properly, and only spread FUD by saying Groovy doesn’t hold to its promises.

As this article is pretty thin on the technical aspects, I won’t explain why his conclusions are wrong – and also because Graeme explained this already. Instead, I’ll just comment on a few of his claims.

Groovy, the Java-like dynamic language for the JVM, matures over time like good wines. After the successful release of Groovy 1.0 in January 2007, the next major milestone with the 1.5 label already hits the shelves. With it, come several interesting novelties that we will examine in this article. The major addition to the language is the support of Java 5 features with annotations, generics and enums, making Groovy the sole alternative dynamic language for the JVM fully supporting frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, JPA, Google Guice, or TestNG. Apart from the new Java 5 features, a few syntax enhancements find their way in the language, as well as a more powerful dynamic behavior customization, a Swing UI builder on steroids, and improved tooling support.

My announcement of the release of Groovy 1.5 triggered the publication of an article that I wrote for InfoQ detailing the new features in this new release. If you want to know what it contains, I invite you to read my article on InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/articles/groovy-1.5-new

And if you want to know a bit more about the Groovy language history, or about my reasons to be part of this project, or if you want to know more about the founders behind G2One, the Groovy and Grails company, here are a few pointers you may be interested in: