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.

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. It’s been a pretty busy year, in fact. Till the JSR got started, we were working like mad on Groovy, adding feature after feature, certainly not taking care enough of bugs, but still, that was a good time. Then came the JSR process, which somehow stopped all our efforts, because of uncertainty, and other considerations, like fear of not doing well with regards to that JSR process. Unfortunately, Groovy’s development almost stopped. Some of the core developers even left, because of the inactivity, and frustration of not being allowed to change things, or because of the lack of management in the project since our leader started working on other projects, taking all of his time.

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. So, of course, it’s Windows-only.

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.

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. When you wish to share some code snippets, to study a stacktrace another developer got, to know on which files other developers are working on, the usual communication means feel less handy, less intuitive to use. So what could we do to improve that?

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”. That’s a real paradigm shift!

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. Apart from helping you with your outline, with constant and useful feedback from your editors and so on, one of the things they do is to give you a nice welcome package as a new O’Reilly book author. Today, I just wanted to describe what they’ve just sent me.

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.

A year ago, James Strachan and Bob McWhirter gave birth to Groovy: a dynamic and agile scripting language for the JVM. Nobody really knows who is the father, and who is the mother, neither do we know how the fecundation happened. Anyhow, James always used to say that it was all Bob’s fault, but indeed, James had so many groovy ideas that it’s hard to believe it’s not his own fault. He kept saying: “Wouldn’t it be groovy if we could do this and that…”. Hence the name “Groovy”. That’s roughly how it all started.