❯ Guillaume Laforge

Groovy, Grails, JSR-223, books, conferences and so on...

groovy book conference

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!

Apart from this great and positive coverage we’ve had lately, two new versions of Groovy and Grails have been released. Groovy released its last version before the first Release Candidate, while Grails released a second and promising version. For having played with Grails recently, I can tell you that’s real fun to use: in a few spare cycles I had during the commuting to work, I was able to develop a full application with all its views, controllers, CRUD operations, in no time. It’s really amazing, and when I showed that to some of my colleagues, they couldn’t believe I only had to write about 20 lines of business code!

What else…

  • Along with the new Groovy release, Sundar upgraded the Groovy script engine for JSR-223’s scripting APIs so that you can have the grooviest experience on Mustang.
  • Groovy in Action is now available through Manning’s MEAP early access program! So if you can’t wait for the paper version, please read the almost final chapters from Manning’s site! This book is really going to become “THE” reference documentation for Groovy, and parts of it might be reused to improve the average quality documentation we’ve currently have online.

So, frankly, I’m very happy these days to see Groovy and Grails progressing so nicely and quickly towards their final releases. The dynamic languages on the JVM are a nice way to move forward to a more agile and versatile enterprise environment. And it feels good to be part of this movement. The coverage we get at conferences, with blog posts, articles or even inquiries from big corporations makes me feel like we’re on the right track!