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.

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! Along with Tugdual Grall from Oracle, we’ll be presenting TS-1246 entitled “Simplify Enterprise Development With Scripting” in the “Core Platform, JAVA SE” track. The abstract of the session is:

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.

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. That’s why I particularly want to thank all those who helped me make this happen.