The newly released Groovy 2.0 brings key static features to the language with static type checking and static compilation, adopts JDK 7 related improvements with Project Coin syntax enhancements and the support of the new “invoke dynamic” JVM instruction, and becomes more modular than before. In this article, we’re going to look into those new features in more detail.

A “static theme” for a dynamic language

Static type checking

Groovy, by nature, is and will always be a dynamic language. However, Groovy is often used as a “Java scripting language”, or as a “better Java” (ie. a Java with less boilerplate and more power features).

The Groovy development team is very pleased to announce the release of Groovy 2.0, the highly popular dynamic language for the Java platform.

For the key highlights of this important milestone, Groovy 2.0 comes packed with:

• a static type checker to let the compiler tell you about the correctness of your code,
• static compilation for the performance of the critical parts of your application,
• modularity, splitting the Groovy JAR into smaller feature-oriented JARs and letting you create your own extension modules,
• JDK 7 Project Coin syntax enhancements, so that Groovy is still as friendly as possible with its Java cousin,
• and JDK 7 Invoke Dynamic integration to benefit from the support of the JVM for dynamic languages.

To learn more about all those great key new features, please read the Groovy 2.0 article on InfoQ that I’ve written, detailing and explaining all those novelties.

Along with the release of Gaelyk 1.2, I’d like to share two interesting links about running functional tests with Geb, and concurrency / parallelism with GPars on Gaelyk.
Gaelyk functional testing with Geb

In the Groovy ecosystem, we’re all aware of the Spock testing framework. On top of Spock, you can use the Geb browser automation library, to easily create functional tests for your web applications, in a nice, readable and expressive fashion.

Thanks to Marcin Erdmann, the Gradle GAE plugin (used by the Gaelyk template project) has been enhanced with support for running functional tests with Spock and Geb. Marcin (who’s blog is actually a fork of my Bloogaey app) has written a small tutorial on how to get started.

This is with great pleasure that the development team announces the release candidate of Groovy 2.0.

For the impatient among you, you can download Groovy 2.0 RC-1 in the download area of the Groovy website. And read the JIRA changelog.

The big change in this release candidate is the modularity aspect. We’ve now fully switched to Gradle, as our build tool, to build a more modular Groovy. You still have a big “all” JAR, but if you’re interested in just picking the core JAR and the needed modules for your project, you can now do so.

I’m very pleased to announce the release of Gaelyk 1.2!

For the impatient, you’ll be able to find the new JAR and Template Project here, as well as the changelog: http://gaelyk.appspot.com/download

You’ll notice that the new template project uses Twitter Bootstrap now, to make it a bit fancier and nicer on the eye!

We also upgraded to the latest and greatest of Groovy and App Engine’s SDK.

In terms of new features, I’d like to particularly highlight:

I was reading MrHaki’s interview on the GR8Conf website this morning, and he had some nice words and good points about why it’s important to attend the conference. You get to meet the creators and developers of the projects you’re interested in and have great content (emphasis mine):

I am looking forward to meeting all the great people that make up the Groovy ecosystem. Everybody is always nice, friendly and ready to help. The atmosphere is always nice and laid back.

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Tim Fox yesterday announced the release of Vert.x 1.0.

Vert.x is a kind ofasynchronous application development environment and server. It works on the JVM, with JDK 7, and supports several languages like Java, Groovy, Ruby or JavaScript.

As the website puts it, vert.x can be defined along the following axis:

• polyglot: supporting Java, Groovy, Ruby and JavaScript or a mix and match of any of these even in a single application
• simplicity: just a few lines of code to create your servers and components, without any XML configuration or anything like that, without being too simplistic
• scalability: with Netty under the hood, with a message passing approach, it’s taking full advantage of the cores of your CPU(s)
• concurrency: vert.x provides a simple concurrency-model so you don’t mess with traditional multithreaded programming

Vert.x competes directly with Node.js here, and Tim also positions it against the Play! 2 / Akka combo.

In the Vi vs Emacs war, I’m in the Vi camp. I’m using Vim on the command-line to quickly edit files, and I’m also using MacVim on my Mac as my text editor. When I’m not using an IDE or the Groovy Console, I also want to be able to edit and run my Groovy scripts in my text editor. It’s not too difficult to run a Groovy script from Vi, you can simply do:

This is this time of the year where all the Groovy hackers and fans are meeting together in Denmark, Copenhagen, for the GR8Conf conference. A conference dedicated to Groovy, Grails, Gradle, Griffon, Spock, GPars and all the Groovy ecosystem. If you’re interested in these technologies or are already using them, this is the opportunity you shouldn’t miss.

Also, you’re pretty lucky, because I have a ticket for half the price to offer you! But there’s just one seat I can offer at that price. So if you’re interested, please add a nice comment to this post, that may be fun, or explaining why you’d like to come, and in a few weeks, I’ll tell you who deserves to win this prize!

It happens once in a while that I want to find all files containing a certain string. I know command-line tools such as grep, cat, and find, but I never remember the right combination to achieve that task. So as to remember and reference it later, I write this small blog post to remind me how to do it:

find . -type f -exec grep YOURSTRING /dev/null {} \;

The find . part will search from the current directory (and all its subdirectories), - type f to search for files (not directories or links, etc), -exec to use the grep command to find through the files, with YOURSTRING as query string, /dev/null to throw away the errors you don’t care about, and {} is the current file to search into with grep.