Groovy.Net, annotations, mocks, applet, and so on

After Groovy won the JAX 2007 innovation award, I took some time to look at what was going on in the blogosphere. There’s always a lot of activity in the Groovy-sphere. It never ceases to amaze me how prolific the community is. Let’s list some of the interesting posts I’ve come across this week-end.

• Chanwit managed to make Groovy run on .Net! This is pretty cool IMHO. He used IKVM for that. You’ll have to try it out.
• Alex shows how to use the native Groovy mocks to mock properties.
• Andres has created a special Groovy applet to let you write Groovy code in your script tags in your HTML pages!
• Glen is having fun with Scriptom (Groovy COM/ActiveX module) to synchronize his Remember the Milk todo list, with Outlook.
• Danno is comparing the upcoming Java closure notation with Groovy’s closure notation. I’m sure you’ll easily know which one is the sexiest and how a language that supports weak typing can be more concise and expressive.
• Warner experiments with Higher-Order Messaging with a Groovy implementation.

Next week should be pretty interesting too as we’re going to release the first beta of Groovy 1.1 in time just before JavaOne where there will be a lot of sessions dedicated to Groovy and Grails. Groovy will be the first alternative language for the JVM to support some Java 5 features. Groovy 1.1 supports annotations and static imports. If you plan to use another language than Java and leverage other key frameworks using annotations like Spring, EJB 3 / JPA, TestNG or Guice, your best option will be Groovy as it will be the sole alternative language supporting those frameworks.