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.
Compatibility with Java has also been improved slightly, for instance the empty for(;;) {} loop wasn’t behaving the same as in Java (no loop, instead of an infinite loop).

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. At the same time, the two G’s will most probably bring a fun coolness factor into the mix, like the icing on the cake!

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.

With the focus on JavaFX, Sun progressively lost all its key talented employees who preferred sailing to more gorgeous seas – I can’t blame them for that. With the new app framework, the timing framework, SwingLabs, painters, new look’n feels, a wealth of OSS and commercial components, Swing had great chances to keep up with the rest of the world, and even keep its bleeding edge and stay ahead of the curve. Alas, Swing is dying in favor of a new technology nobody cares about – why would one use JavaFX when Adobe’s Flex and Microsoft’s Silverlight are so much more advanced and ready for prime-time, thought and tool’ed for the designer in mind?

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. Our first issue includes a Grails tutorial, a Groovy/Swing tutorial, community news and more.

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). Here, we’ll mainly cover the new features of beta-2.

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. Here’s what I came up with:

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...

The mythical eagle/lion is out the door, with a 0.0 version number! Griffon is a Grails-like framework for building rich Swing client applications (applets, webstart, standalone). Andres was hinting at the first release of this new project, and Danno just announced it officially after having shown some nice preview of what it’s all about by showing a Twitter client built with Griffon.

The Groovy swing team’s long been hard at work to provide you with powerful declarative Swing UIs with the Groovy Swing builder, and they’ve now switched gears to go a big step further by really empowering developers to write, build and distribute clean MVC apps.

It’s a bit of a late notice, but if you’re in Paris these days, you may wish to come to the Paris JUG tomorrow night (Tuesday, September 9th). I’ll be presenting an introduction to Groovy (the dynamic language for the JVM), as well as a presentation on Grails (the agile and productive web application framework) with the help of my friend and former colleague Fabrice Robini.

You can register here and get more information about the agenda of that Paris JUG night.

A few weeks ago on the Groovy mailing-lists, a user wanted to know a way to find which variables were bound or not in a Groovy script, in the context of some custom rules engine. In a Groovy script, names that are not local variables, method parameters, etc. can come from the “binding” associated with a script. This is the way we “inject” variables and values into a script. A usual technique for retrieving variables lazily (for instance when you don’t want to put in the binding a variable that is heavy to compute or retrieve) is to create a custom Binding class and override the methods for getting variables from it. But if you really really want to know before executing the scripts (to avoid any side effect upon execution) what variables are bound or not, I’ve come up with the following script which lists the bound and unbound variables, without having to execute the script.