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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.

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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:

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.

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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.

I had the pleasure to participate in OCTO’s IT University (Université du SI in French) a couple weeks ago. The conference was really great, and I think France really needed such a high-quality IT event as there was no real good event like that until now. So big kudos to the organizers.

Apart from great food, excellent speakers covering interesting topics, I had the pleasure of spending time with my friends from the OSSGTP community (Vincent, Guillaume, Patrick, Mag, Didier, Fabrice, Erwan), with my former colleagues, and with some great guys like Ross Mason, Erik Meijer (with great tshirts as usual), and more. But perhaps the most impressive, interesting and emotional-heavy moment of the conference was the closing keynote by astronaut Neil Armstrong, as featured on the picture on the side. This man is so humble, interesting, funny, elegant, that everybody really enjoyed listening to him speaking about the space conquest, distilling some nice and funny anecdotes and making parallels with IT, the story of computers, etc. Awesome! It was such a big honnor to have him there!

If you’re in the North America and you want to get up to speed with Groovy and Grails, G2One, the Groovy/Grails company, has just announced its updated training schedule for this year.

From August to November, we’ll be in:

• San Jose (CA)
• Chicago (IL)
• Orange County (CA)
• Austin (TX)
• Calgary (Canada)
• and Atlanta (GA)

You can find the exact dates online. And you can already register for the San Jose and Chicago dates in August.

If you’re in Paris, next week, make sure you don’t miss the “Université du SI” (IT University) conference, organized by my former colleagues from OCTO Technology. This conference is going to rock! Quite frankly, I think France was seriously lacking a good IT conference, and I think OCTO is going to deliver on that promise. I’ve been told they are pretty soon running out of entry passes as we’re close to the deadline, so it’s your last chance to register.