If you want to learn everything about Groovy and Grails, get in touch with all the projects committers and contributors, and have a great time, you should definitely not miss the Groovy / Grails Experience that will take place in Reston, VA, USA – February 21 - 23, 2008

There’s a pretty impressive list of speakers, and the session schedule looks pretty tasty. It’s the best opportunity to get the right information straight from the horse’s mouth. A lot of topics will be covered, ranging from introductions to Groovy / Grails up to more advanced topics like DSLs, design patterns in dynamic languages, Java integration, Swing UIs, GORM, and more.

It’s funny, but before working on the Groovy project, there was a song I’ve always liked: A Groovy Kind of Love, by Phill Collins. Do you think it was premonitory? That I’d work on Groovy? And speaking of Groovy love… I’ve come across some nice love messages towards Groovy that I wanted to share with you.

Jorge Lugo, a software engineer in the Washington DC area, sums up pretty well the appeal Groovy has to Java developers:

A new source of information on Groovy and Grails has just been launched: the Groovy Zone. Rick Ross et al. have built upon the DZone community-driven linkblog, and JavaLobby, to create various “Zones” on numerous topics like Java, AJAX, CSS, and also Groovy and Grails. Andres Almiray, Steven Devijver and myself have become “zone leaders”, to shepherd the Groovy and Grails content.

We had AboutGroovy where Scott Davis lists on the interesting news in the Groovy and Grails spheres, and Glen Smith’sGroovyBlogs blog aggrgator listing several super interesting blogs related to Groovy and Grails… and now we have the GroovyZone!

Jason Hunter from MarkLogic (and JDOM fame) has crawled the Groovy mailing-lists archives with his gorgeous MarkMail interface.

Not all the archives have been indexed so far, as we’re still missing some older archives from before April 2004, but there’s already about 70K messages loaded. In the following screenshot, you can see the number of messages sent to the lists per month, across the course of time.

An interesting remark: you’ll certainly have noticed the jump in the traffic around January 2007. It coincides with the release of Groovy 1.0, our first official final and stable release, after years of betas. Almost overnight (or “over-month” shall I say), the traffic on the lists doubled!

Graeme pointed me at a white-paperish article claiming Groovy would not be Enterprise-ready. If the article had been acurate, I would have welcomed it, and we could have found ways to improve Groovy to make it ready, but unfortunately, the author did not do his job properly, and only spread FUD by saying Groovy doesn’t hold to its promises.

As this article is pretty thin on the technical aspects, I won’t explain why his conclusions are wrong – and also because Graeme explained this already. Instead, I’ll just comment on a few of his claims.

Groovy, the Java-like dynamic language for the JVM, matures over time like good wines. After the successful release of Groovy 1.0 in January 2007, the next major milestone with the 1.5 label already hits the shelves. With it, come several interesting novelties that we will examine in this article. The major addition to the language is the support of Java 5 features with annotations, generics and enums, making Groovy the sole alternative dynamic language for the JVM fully supporting frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, JPA, Google Guice, or TestNG. Apart from the new Java 5 features, a few syntax enhancements find their way in the language, as well as a more powerful dynamic behavior customization, a Swing UI builder on steroids, and improved tooling support.

My announcement of the release of Groovy 1.5 triggered the publication of an article that I wrote for InfoQ detailing the new features in this new release. If you want to know what it contains, I invite you to read my article on InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/articles/groovy-1.5-new

And if you want to know a bit more about the Groovy language history, or about my reasons to be part of this project, or if you want to know more about the founders behind G2One, the Groovy and Grails company, here are a few pointers you may be interested in:

G2One, Inc., the Groovy & Grails professional services company, and the Groovy development team are proud to announce the release of Groovy 1.5.

Groovy is a dynamic language for the JVM that integrates seamlessly with the Java platform. It offers a Java-like syntax, with language features inspired by Smalltalk, Python or Ruby, and lets your reuse all your Java libraries and protect the investment you made in Java skills, tools or application servers. Groovy can be used for various purposes, from adhoc shell scripting leveraging Java APIs, to full-blown web applications built on Spring and Hibernate through the Grails web framework. It can also be integrated very easily in your applications to externalize business logic, create Domain-Specific Languages, or to provide templating, XML parsing capabilities, and much more.

As we’ve announced it on the Groovy and Grails mailing-lists today, G2One, Inc. is born. Founded by Graeme Rocher (ex-CTO of SkillsMatter and Grails project lead), Alex Tkachman (ex-COO of JetBrainsmakers of the best Java IDE in the world) and myself (Software Architect at OCTO, Groovy Project Manager and JSR-241 Spec Lead), the company will provide training, support, consulting, and commercial products around Groovy and Grails, making G2One the official source for Groovy and Grails expertise!

It’s going to be a wonderful new adventure. After years spent working on Groovy at nights and week-ends, it’s going to be pretty refreshing, and it’s going to be a great opportunity to shift gears to spread the good word, iron out both projects, and at last working full-time on my pet projects.

Dear Groovy community,

Groovy 1.1-beta-3 is there, paving the way for an RC-1 in the following weeks, and if all goes well, for 1.1-final in October, right in time for the Grails eXchange conference that takes place in London. This conference will also be the opportunity for the Groovy developer team to meet for the fourth Groovy Developer Conference! With Groovy 1.1 released by then, it’ll be time to think about what’s going to happen for the next major version of Groovy.