Groovy is a very successful and powerful dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine that provides seamless integration with Java, and has its roots firmly planted in Java itself for the syntax and APIs and other languages such as Smalltalk, Python or Ruby for its dynamic capabilities. Groovy is used in many Open Source projects such as Grails, Spring, JBoss Seam and more, as well as integrated in commercial products and Fortune 500 mission-critical applications for its scripting capabilities offering a nice extension mechanism to these applications, or for its ability to let subject matter experts and developers author embedded Domain-Specific Languages to express business concepts in a readable and maintainable fashion. Read more...

This is with very great pleasure and honor that I’m announcing the final release of Groovy 1.6, on behalf of the Groovy development team and SpringSource. Obviously, 1.6 is a very important milestone for the project, with several great new features and improvements: great runtime performance improvements multiple assignments optional return in if/else and try/catch blocks AST transformations and all the provided transformation annotations like @Singleton, @Lazy, @Immutable, @Delegate and friends the Grape module and dependency system and its @Grab transformation various Swing builder improvements, thanks to the Swing / Griffon (http://griffon. Read more...

The Groovy development team and SpringSource are pleased to announce the second candidate for Groovy 1.6. This release is a bug fix release, and as you can see by looking at the JIRA issues closed (almost a hundred), a lot of work has been done to ensure that our next major release is of great quality, and various improvements have been introduced – check for instance the much nicer and thourough output of GroovyDoc! Read more...

The Groovy development team and SpringSource are happy to announce the release of the first release candidate of Groovy 1.6. The JIRA report for this new version lists 74 bug tickets, 26 improvements and 8 new features: http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&styleName=Html&version=14009 Among the bugs being fixed, we tackled issues about: the compiler bytecode errors varargs handling covariant returns Windows startup scripts As well as a few regressions: the args variable not bound in Groovy scripts a performance regression in MarkupBuilder a problem with DOMCategory which was particularly problematic for Grails Fixes in line error reporting should be handy for IDE vendors, as well as for Cobertura code coverage. Read more...

I’m very pleased to echo, here on my blog, the announcement of the acquisition of G2One, the Groovy/Grails company I co-founded, by SpringSource, the company behind the Spring framework! Everybody knows Spring and SpringSource already, its wealth of Enterprise projects, and how it quickly became the de facto Enterprise standard for building mission-critical applications. Both Groovy and Grails will bring more dynamicity and agility to the Spring portofolio projects, thanks to tighter integration, cross-polination, and further extensibility. Read more...

I’m really sad to hear the report Kirill makes on Sun progressively abandonning Swing (also posted on java.net). Swing is really a very good framework for building rich client applications, and from what I’ve heard and seen, it’s even better than what exists in the .Net world, or compared to things like SWT or Cocoa. Sun is leaving a gem in the cold to bet everything on a half-backed JavaFX technology. Read more...

I’m very happy to echo the release of the first issue of GroovyMag, the Groovy and Grails magazine! This is an electronic PDF magazine which will bring you news, articles and tutorials around the Groovy dynamic language for the JVM and the Grails agile web application framework. As the site shows: GroovyMag covers a wide variety of topics in the Groovy and Grails world, featuring some of the best and brightest names in the Groovosphere. Read more...

This is with great pleasure that the Groovy development team and G2One announce the joint release of both Groovy 1.5.7 – current stable and maintenance branch – and Groovy 1.6-beta-2 – the upcoming major release. Groovy 1.5.7 contains mainly bug fixes (61 bug fixes), but also some minor API improvements (20 improvements) backported from the1.6 branch, whereas Groovy 1.6-beta-2 brings a wealth of novelty (68 bug fixes and 38 improvements and new features). Read more...

In the same vein as my recent article on how to know the variables which are bound or not in a script, a user asked how he could list in order the properties defined in a class. Unfortunately, using MyClass.metaClass.properties won’t guarantee the order in which properties were created. But reusing the technique in my previous article, one can visit the Groovy AST, in order, and just look at the property definitions, fill an ordered list of these properties, and return it once the traversal is finished. Read more...

After the German translation of Groovy in Action, there’s now a Japanese version also available! But not only has it been translated, but it has also been improved and covers Groovy 1.5.6 and contains fixes to all the errata of the original version. Here’s the announcement from Dierk: I’m very happy to announce that the japanese edition of “Groovy in Action” has just hit the shelves. Please visit the publisher’s page or on Amazon Japan. Read more...