I was interviewed by Darryl Taft from eWeek yesterday about the Groovy programming language’s recent popularity boost. You can read the two-page long interview here: Groovy programming language sees major boost in popularity You’ll certainly be interested in the answers to some of the questions, in particular who’s using Groovy, or for which use cases Groovy is being used: — Why do you think Groovy has gained in popularity over the last year? Read more...

Yesterday, the Groovy programming language team released the release candidate for Groovy 2.2, as well as a bug-fix release of Groovy 2.1.8. Here’s the announcement I sent on the various communication channels: The Groovy team is happy to announce the release of the release candidate of Groovy 2.2, as well as a bug-fix release for Groovy 2.1.8. As you can guess with this release candidate, the final version of Groovy 2. Read more...

For the first time, Groovy enters the top 20 of the TIOBE programming language index, as you can see in the table below: As the headline and first paragraph indicate: TIOBE Programming Community Index for October 2013 October Headline: Lightweight Java language Groovy enters top 20 Programming language Groovy enters the top 20 for the first time. Groovy is an object-oriented scripting language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It is fully compatible with Java, making it easy to combine Java programs with Groovy. Read more...

The Groovy team is happy to announce the releases of the second beta of Groovy 2.2, along with a bug fix release of Groovy 2.1.7. We’re close to moving towards RC mode for the upcoming Groovy 2.2 release, and we’d be happy to hear about your feedback about this new version when used in your projects. Please have a moment to test it against your code, and tell us if you notice any problem or regression. Read more...

Václav Pech just announced the release of GPars 1.1, the multi-paradigm concurrency and parallel Groovy-friendly toolkit: The GA release of GPars 1.1.0 has just been published and is ready for you to grab. It brings gradual improvements into dataflow as well as a few other domains. Some highlights: LazyDataflowVariable added to allow for lazy asynchronous values Timeout for Selects Added a Promise-based API for value selection through the Select class Enabled listening for bind errors on DataflowVariables Minor API improvement affecting Promise and DataflowReadChannel Protecting agent’s blocking methods from being called from within commands Updated to the latest 0. Read more...

C’est l’été, il fait très chaud, et j’ai plein de menthe dans mon jardin… d’où l’idée de faire un dessert rafraîchissant : une glace à la menthe maison ! Un petit problème aussi : je n’ai pas de sorbetière, donc il faut faire sans ! Alors que nous faut-il : 25 cl de lait une bonne grosse poignée de feuilles de menthe fraîche 2 oeufs (2 jaunes et 2 blancs) 60 g de sucre en poudre, ou idéalement sucre glace (10 g + 50 g) 25 cl de crème liquide (non allégée) 1 pincée de sel Tout d’abord, il faut laisser infuser la menthe dans le lait, dans une casserole, pendant une bonne vingtaine de minutes, à couvert, sans faire bouillir le lait. Read more...

I recently came across InstantServer.io, a nice little service that allows you to instantiate an Ubuntu server for testing, for 35 minutes, on Amazon EC2. You click on the green button, and you’re given an account and a password, as well as the details to connect onto the machine through SSH. Please note that the service seems to be victim of its success, as requesting a new server takes more and more time it seems. Read more...

On the Groovy project team, we were wondering about which base JDK to support. So far, even the latest and greatest Groovy (version 2.1.4 just released today), we still support JDK 5 — despite being an End-of-Life’d product for a long while already. At conferences, I often ask the question on which versions of the JDK attendees are using, locally and in production, and it seems that JDK 5 has almost totally vanished off the face of the planet, but despite JDK 7 being quite mature now, it’s still JDK 6 that’s more widely deployed. Read more...

This is with great pleasure that the Gaelyk team announces the release of Gaelyk 2.0, the lightweight toolkit for developing applications on Google App Engine with the Groovy dynamic language. For the impatient, go directly to the download page! It’s been long in the making, and there are quite a lot of new features to speak about, like the migration to Groovy 2.1 and GAE 1.8, the new Search DSL, improvements to the URL routing system, various performance optimizations, and more. Read more...

Since I started using Gradle for building my projects, as soon as I needed to create a brand new project from scratch, I wished that Gradle guided my hand and created the right directory structure and minimal Gradle build script. A bit less than two years ago, I was inspired by Dierk’s gist providing a basic build that provided two tasks, one for creating the directory layout, and the other one to create the Gradle wrapper. Read more...