A bit of Groovy history...

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.

But around october, I was really fed up with that state of things. I really wanted things to change! Groovy was somehow dying, if no action were taken. That’s why I started a big effort on making the Groovy ship move again. With my friend, Jeremy Rayner, we managed to wake up everybody, to organize a JSR meeting in November, and I spent a huge amount of time fixing bugs in the current implementation to make a beta-8 release and to help our users as much as I could on the forums. I “hired” also some new developers who helped me in the process. Thanks a lot to them all (Russel Winder, Jochen Theodorou, Dierk Koenig, and Scott Stirling). The JSR is also progressing thanks to the efforts of Jeremy Rayner, and John Rose with his first cut at the new Groovy grammar. For this new year, Jeremy gave us a pretty good summary and overview of the work in the JSR process.

We’ve been biled, we’re certainly going to receive some other similar criticism. Hani’s got pretty good points, and we’re trying to address those concerns and the concerns of our users as much as we can. I hope Groovy will mature even more in 2005, and I think we should have a fairly good and standardized implementation.

The primary reason for that blog entry was to guide you through the history behing the JSR process. That’s Richard Manson-Haefeld who’s mostly responsible for that, and he just blogged about it. He guides us through the history of the Groovy JSR.

2005 should be a Groovy year! So, Groovy new year to everybody!