Groovy Weekly skipped a beat as I was very busy: I was very fortunate to spend my last week in California for various meetings, plus being a keynote speaker at JFrog’s SwampUp conference in Napa Valley. I had the chance to speak again about the Groovy release process and its history (based on my recent Devoxx talk).

Congrats to the Gradle team for releasing Gradle 2.4 with much faster builds!

Hurry up to register to GR8Conf Europe 2015, as registration closes on May 15th! Hurry up, and join the Groovy ecosystem fans gathering!

Remember the Android support of Groovy 2.4? Well, the new New York Times Android application, written in Groovy and using RxJava is now live! If a hugely popular Android app is leveraging Groovy, yours can too!

With Groovy’s move to the Apache Software Foundation, don’t forget to star the new Groovy Github repository!

Don’t miss the interesting interviews of Jeff Brown and Guillaume Laforge.

Reminder about our infrastructure changes, as we move the Groovy project through the incubation process at Apache: the JIRA issue tracker has moved, and don’t forget that the Groovy mailing-lists are also moving. The novelty this week is that the Apache Git repository is now the new mainline, but you can contribute pull requests on the Apache Groovy Github mirror.

No big focus this week in the editorial, but as in the previous edition, I’d like to remind you about the following infrastructure changes, as we move the Groovy project through the incubation process at Apache: the JIRA issue tracker has moved, and don’t forget that the Groovy mailing-lists are also moving. The novelty this week is that the Apache Git repository is now the new mainline, but you can contribute pull requests on the Apache Groovy Github mirror.

We’re only mid April but what a year it’s been so far! From Groovy & Grails’ loss of funding, leading Grails to a new home at Object Computing Inc. and Groovy at the Apache Software Foundation, to Guillaume Laforge joining Restlet and Cédric joining GradleWare. Against all odds, Groovy released its 2.4 version with the Android support, and the big 3.0 release of Grails saw the light of day. And on another personal note… I’ve finished my first marathon! What’s next for the rest of the year?

I hope you all had a Groovy Easter, with baskets full of eggs and chocolate!

Little update on the Groovy infrastructure, as the project moves into incubation at Apache, the JIRA issue tracker has moved, and don’t forget that the Groovy mailing-lists are also moving.

Releases

• SwissKnife 1.2.3 released, the Swiss knife for for Android development with Groovy
• Ratpack 0.9.15 released
• Spock Subjects Collaborators Extension 1.0.3 released by Marcin Grzejszczak
• Grails 3.0.1 released
• ElasticSearch Groovy client v1.5.0 released

Articles

• Grails 3.0 built upon Spring Boot and Gradle on JaxEnter
• Using Android product flavors to build full and demo version of an application, by Manij Shrestha

News

• The Groovy JIRA has now moved to Apache
• Gradle has a brand new forum powered by Discourse
• Tim Fox shares a glimpse of the upcoming new Vert.x website
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen Grails Diary week 14

Presentations

• SpringOne2GX 2014
  • Ratpack and Grails 3 by Lari Hotari
  • Building awesome APIs with Grails by Chris Latimer
  • Gradle for Android by Ken Kousen
  • Introduction to Grails 3.0 by Dan Vega
  • Creating and running a Grails 3 application by Dan Vega

Tweets

• Creating iOS applications with Groovy and GrooScript, using ReactJS native
• April Fools from Apache Groovy mentor says Groovy could graduate on April 1st already
• Spring Boot 1.1.12 available on GVM
• Spring Boot 1.2.3 available on GVM
• Grails 3.0.1 available on GVM

Mailing-list posts

• Groovy’s JIRA moved to Apache

Books

• Peter Ledbrook shares early draft chapters of his Practical Groovy self-published book

Events

• GR8Conf US 2015 registration is open

Today marks the end of the sponsorship of the Groovy and Grails projects by Pivotal. The projects are now turning a new page in their lives. For Groovy, the project is going to wear some feathers, with joining the Apache Software Foundation. And Grails is releasing its major 3.0 version.

With Groovy’s move to Apache, it’s important to notice that the Groovy mailing-lists are moving. You must subscribe to the new mailing-lists at Apache, as we won’t force-subscribe people, so you’ll have to opt-in to these new lists.

The big news today is that Groovy has now passed the vote for entering the Apache Software Foundation incubator! Thus, in the coming weeks and months, while going through the incubation process, you can expect some changes in terms of infrastructure (moving sources, issue tracker, mailng-lists, etc) to be taking place, but don’t worry, we’ll keep you informed along the way.

This past week, we’ve had some new releases of Groovy, as well as the second release candidate for Grails 3! Grails 3 is really really close now, get ready, it’s gonna rock the house!

The Groovy team is happy to announce another 2.4 release, with Groovy 2.4.3.

We noticed some regressions that needed our attention, and we decided to release rapidly after our recent 2.4.2 release of last week. Please upgrade to 2.4.3 if you’re on the 2.4.x line.

You can read about the tickets resolved in our changelog: http://groovy-lang.org/changelogs/changelog-2.4.3.html

And you can download the Groovy distribution as usual on the new Groovy website.

I’d also like to announce that Groovy passed the vote to enter the Apache Software Foundation Incubator! In the coming weeks, we’ll be through the incubation process, likely for a few months, where we’ll be moving things around (sources, JIRA, mailing-lists, etc), so you can expect a bit of change, but we’ll keep you posted on how we progress along.

The Groovy development team is happy to announce the bug fix releases of Groovy 2.4.2 and Groovy 2.3.11.

For the 2.4.2 release, some key performance improvements have found their way in static compilation mode, so you might be happy to see your programs snappier!

Along with those two releases, you’ll notice lots more documentation has been written on the new Groovy website, as well as important updates to existing topics. You might want to have a look at the following new or improved sections:

Following-up last week’s decision of the Groovy team to join the Apache Software Foundation, this week, a proposal has been made and submitted, and Apache has announced it on its blog. So the process is now really officially started and on its track!

Releases

• Grails 3.0 RC-1 released
• GVM 2.4.0 released with broadcast and offline checks optimizations
• Groovy Grails Toolsuite 3.6.4 released with Groovy 2.4 support

Articles

• The Groovy team and Apache members collaborated on a proposal to join the Apache Software Foundation
• Matt Raible interviewed Guillaume Laforge about Groovy moving to Apache
• Darryl Taft from eWeek is covering the proposal of Groovy to join the Apache incubator
• Paul Krill writes on CIO “dumped by Pivotal, Groovy moves to Apache”
• Kay Ewbank on Groovy joining the Apache Software Foundation
• Groovy hands-on, in French
• A new Griffon / JavaFX tutorial is available
• A flamewar against Gradle which is said to suffer from the halting problem
• Allegro Tech is sharing its success story adopting Gradle

News

• The Apache Software Foundation announces Groovy’s submission to become an official Apache project
• At the Adobe Summit, Time Warner Cable announced some of its Gradle plugins to work with Adobe tools
• A very interesting contribution from JetBrain’s Peter Gromov has been merged into Groovy’s master to speedup compilation
• OpenCSVIterator: a useful library for processing flat text files in Groovy and Java
• GR8CRM, a suite of Grails plugins for Customer Relationship Management by Göran Ehrsson
• A nice online Groovy playground by Tim Roes

Presentations

• Great introduction to Groovy by Michał Mally at the Groovy user group in Poland
• Groovy for Java developers, by Peter Ledbrook, recorded during SpringOne2GX 2014
• Groovy browser automation with Geb, by Colin Harrington, recorded at SpringOne2GX 2014
• A video introduction to Gradle for Android Studio

Tweets

• Cédric Champeau is annoyed when people reduce Groovy to just a “dynamic” language when it’s much more than that
• Ken Kousen tasting a Groovy Smoothie
• Matthew McCullough Groovy JMeter plugin is moving to Github, like the many Google Code projects following Google’s closing
• GrooScript plugin working for Grails 3 RC-1

Mailing-list posts

• The Groovy incubation proposal is being discussed on the Apache mailing-lists

Podcasts

• Ken Kousen published Groovy Podcast episode 8

Code snippets

• Using RxJs from GrooScript with Groovy’s @BaseScript transformation

Books

• You can find Ken Kousen’s Making Java Groovy book code samples on Manning’s website

Events

• Registration for SpringOne2GX 2015 is open
• Guillaume Laforge will be speaking about Groovy’s continuous delivery at the SwampUp conference
• At the Gradle Summit, Netflix’ build team will share lessons learned about Gradle plugins