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 2.2 is fast approaching, and we’d be happy to get as much feedback on this release as possible, to squash potential bugs before the general availability of 2.2. So please be sure to test your applications with this release candidate.

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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. There is quite some competition in this field of lightweight languages that fit together with Java. Groovy beats other well-known JVM languages such as Scala (#36), JavaFX Script (#41) and Clojure (#76). Let’s see whether it can keep its top 20 position the next few months.

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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.

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 0.7.0 GA version of Multiverse
• Migrated to Groovy 2.0
• Used @CompileStatic where appropriate
• A few bug fixes

You can download GPars 1.1.0 directly or grab it from the maven repo.

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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. Cela nous donnerait un bon lait au goût de menthe !

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.

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.

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.

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. I turned that gist into a blog post of my own, with just minor version updates, as I wanted to remember how to do that the next time I’d create a new Gradle-based project.

The Groovy team is always looking at ways to further improve and encourage the collaboration and contributions from the community.

Today, the we are** looking for a sponsor for a dedicated server** that would host our new Continuous Integration server. If you or your company is interested in helping Groovy by contributing hardware and/or hosting, please contact us.

The details of the project are available here.

On behalf of the Groovy team, thanks in advance for your help and support!