This round number edition is pretty busy!

Last week ended with a pretty sad note, with the news of Leonard Nimoy’s passing, the famous vulcan extraterrestrial from Star Trek. This certainly resonates with the Groovy community (and geeks & fans out large) because of our very own Spock testing framework. So let’s all gather and have a thought for this great actor and for his family.

But as a tribute to this great actor and character, the long awaited news is that the Spock testing framework releases its 1.0 version!

Groovy keeps rocking with a joint release of Groovy 2.4.1 and also a 2.3.10!

And did you notice the nice new design of the new Grails website, based on Groovy’s website? That’s a family look!

Also, I’d like to end this short editorial with a big congrats to the GVM team who’s reached the 100,000 unique installs! That’s a big milestone!

Releases

• Joint releases of Groovy 2.4.1 and Groovy 2.3.10
• GMavenPlus 1.4 released

Articles

• Voxxed covers the latest double Groovy release drops and the deliberations on the choice of a foundation for the project
• Shane Curcuru reflected on the fact of Groovy joining a foundation
• MrHaki’s Groovy Goodness: Access XML-RPC API
• Kyle Boon on using Groovy and Go’s GVMs together
• Installing SonarQube for managing the quality of your Grails project
• Miguel de la Cruz teaches a Geb 101 course in this article
• Laurent Napias wrote an article in French on Groovy on Android with the SwissKnife library
• Andy Wilkinson wrote about better dependency management for Gradle
• Dustin Marx on writing Groovy’s XmlParser’s Node content as XML
• Integrating PubNub with Grails by Sumant Thakur
• Ted Vinke on starting a video blog on Grails

News

• Guillaume Laforge submitted Groovy to the Google Summer of Code program
• Ken Kousen is co-hosting the Groovy podcast with Peter Ledbrook
• The Grails team launches its new website, based on Groovy’s new site design
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 8 of 2015

Tweets

• GVM crossed the 100k unique installs mark!
• Cédric Champeau is happy having released two versions of Groovy in only two hours
• Dean Macaulay finds that mixing Grails and Intellij IDEA makes a world of productivity
• Tim Yates Groovy-logic library is listed on the MiniKanren website
• Russel Winder wonders how Groovy release can be “hot” as Groovy is “cool”!
• Groovy 2.3.10 is available on GVM
• Groovy 2.4.1 is available on GVM
• GrooScript encourages speakers to use its vintage logo
• Russel Winder is looking for some CSS guru for redesigning the GPars website
• Dierk König notes that Groovy is 4 times in JavaOne 2014’s rock stars
• Cédric Champeau notes the progress on the new Groovy documentation but highlights lots of sections looking for help for completion
• Cédric Champeau highlights this commit of the Groovy executable documentation on type checking extensions
• Answering Peter Ledbrook and Ken Kousen on the Groovy podcast, Cédric mentions that Grails’ new site is a static site on Github, forked from the Groovy website
• Kostis Kapelonis teases about Groovy giving a 75% reduction of code lines against Java, as an excerpt of his Spock book
• Kostis Kapelonis thinks the “Making Java Groovy” book from Ken Kousen is one of the best Groovy for Java developers book he’s ever read
• Versions 1.4.3 and 1.4.4 of the ElasticSearch Groovy client released with special support for Grails 2.x
• Schalk Cronjé is astonished that some Java developers still don’t know about Spock, Gradle, Bintray and Artifactory
• Erik Pragt is working on an IntelliJ IDEA plugin in Groovy to support Ionic framework
• Dan Woods and Iván López discuss about LogBack’s Groovy DSL configuration and the tool to convert XML configurations into Groovy

Code snippets

• Andrés Almiray shares his configuration for combining Asciidoctor, Ditaa based diagrams, PDF rendering, in your Gradle build
• Vladimír Oraný is trying to achieve better test isolation in Grails
• Groovy making 3D figures dance in the browser thanks to GrooScript and Three.js
• Danny Hun shares how to use Asciidoctor, Gradle and Reveal.JS

Podcasts

• Peter Ledbrook and Ken Kousen recorded Groovy podcast episode 7

Books

• Konstantinos Kapelonis is authoring Java testing with Spock for Manning

Events

• The SpringOne2GX 2015 call for paper is open
• You can submit a talk to the Gradle Summit
• The Greach conference has announced its final agenda
• Andrew Reitz will be speaking about Groovy on Android at GR8Conf US

The Groovy development team is happy to announce the joint releases of the Groovy 2.4.1 and Groovy 2.3.10 of the Groovy programming language for the Java platform.

Both releases are bug fix releases, and while Groovy 2.4.1 is the latest official stable branch, we thought it might be helpful to some projects who are still on the 2.3.x line to get a final release for that branch. But going forward, the 2.3.x branch won’t see any upcoming release.

The past week’s been pretty calm, in terms of news, but a few of them really stood out.

Netflix again leverages Groovy for scripting its user experience API (additional coverage following last week’s announcement).

The Gradleware team delivered Gradle 2.3! Congrats guys!

And closer to home, a very important discussion about moving Groovy into a foundation has started, inviting members and representatives of different foundations to join and offer their views and experience on the matter.

So what’s Groovy this week? The Groovy community is still celebrating the 4.5+ million downloads of Groovy last year, is drive testing the upcoming Gradle 2.3, while Greach is announcing its impressive roster of speakers.

But there’s an item of news dear to my heart this week, with the “go to production” message from Dierk about Groovy in Action, second edition! Many times the book has been revised to catch up with the latest and greatest of Groovy, and this new edition will bring you up-to-date with Groovy 2.4, so you can expect the official print and e-book final versions imminently!

Congrats to the GrooScript team with the GrooScript 1.0 release! With GrooScript, if you will, you can have a full Groovy experience, from the build (Gradle), backend (Groovy, Grails, Ratpack), mobile (Groovy on Android), up to the front-end web layer with Groovy translated into JavaScript!

Another impressive and widely acclaimed release is the first milestone of Grails 3! You can have a look at the novelties in Grails 3, and watch a screencast about it.

This week is a bit more positive than the previous with the announcement of the release of Groovy 2.4!

But some interesting and thoughtful pieces have also been written about last week’s sad news about Pivotal divesting in Groovy and Grails.

In spite of this, SpringOne2GX 2015 has been announced with 4 Groovy and Grails tracks, in Washington DC, mid-September.

Last but not least, the second edition of Groovy in Action is going into production!

The Groovy team is happy to announce the release of Groovy 2.4.0!

The big highlight of this release is the Android support, which allows developers to write Android applications fully using Groovy, with much less boilerplate code than raw Java.

The team also focused on various improvements in terms of performance, smaller bytecode generation, or memory consumption.

Other interesting aspects worth noticing in this release are:

• traits can use the @SelfType annotation with static type checking enabled to restrict to what classes traits can be applied
• GDK methods improvements
• some refinements to existing AST transformations
• further Groovysh improvements as well.

Please have a look at the full release notes for Groovy 2.4 to know more about the new features and all the interesting tickets closed.

This week’s edition of Groovy Weekly is a bit peculiar, as the big news of the week is Pivotal’s announcement that it will stop funding the Groovy and Grails projects.

As a result those popular Open Source projects are now seeking a new home!

You can read Guillaume Laforge’s and Graeme Rocher’s announcements to hear a bit more about the story. And if your company is interested in further funding the projects, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Pivotal just announced it’s decision to stop sponsoring and funding the development of the popular Groovy and Grails Open Source projects. As a result, both Groovy and Grails are looking for new sponsors willing to further help develop the projects full steam!

The Groovy programming language has been around for a while for more than 11 years. During that time, it has nicely evolved from a side hobby project to the very mature and successful alternative language it is today, used by Fortune 500 companies throughout the world, in various projects and contexts.