As stated on Javalobby: “The Guru of Groovy shares his Thoughts”! Well, it seems like I’m that Guru! And that’s been my first official interview. That was a quite fun and interesting exchange of mails between Andrew and me, and it allowed me to develop a few interesting points I never had time to explain.

Andrew Glover, Vanward Technologies’ CTO, is a fan of Groovy. He wrote several great articles on DeveloperWorks in a “Practically Groovy” series". I’ve recently had the pleasure to be interviewed by himregarding Groovy, and here’s what the abstract says:

Call me a geek, but I’d really love to buy me one of these little Wifi rabbits. The Nabaztag rabbit is a 23-cm high white rabbit with moving ears, and a set of flash LEDs of different colors. You can pair it with another rabbit so that when you move the first one’s ears, will automatically make the other one move its ears accordingly, even if your in another town or country (as long as you have a permanent DSL connection). Nabaztag can sing songs, or through some service subscription, he can react to the stock market trends, or to the weather, flashing in yellow when the sun is shinning.

Pour mon anniversaire, Stéphanie m’a offert du matériel pour faire de l’aquarelle : un carnet à dessin et un coffret avec 16 couleurs. Comme le temps était plutôt agréable et clément ce week-end, nous avons décidé de pique-niquer auprès du Grand Canal du Château de Versailles. J’ai emmené tout mon attirail, et j’ai réalisé ma première aquarelle, que voici :

Franck Rasolo, our IntelliJ expert, just released and announced the inital version of the GroovyJ IntelliJ IDEA plugin!

The Groovy team is pleased to announce the first public release of GroovyJ, a plug-in that integrates the Groovy language into IntelliJ IDEA.

You may browse the current GroovyJ status page which lists the features shipped with this initial release.

In a nutshell, with GroovyJ:

• a default Groovy runtime is automatically installed as a global library
• Groovy files can be edited with some amount of syntax highlighting
• ‘Run Configurations’ can be created for runnable Groovy scripts
• Groovy scripts can be run with the output being captured in the embedded console window
• Groovy scripts located under module source/test folders will be automatically compiled when compiling modules

Note: This plug-in is available through IDEA’s plug-in manager and requires IntelliJ IDEA 5.0 build #3378 or higher.

Read more...

The JavaOne crowd is applauding Groovy! And the blogosphere is full of friendly comments towards our dynamic and agile scripting language for the JVM.

Jeremy Rayner (our co-JSR-241 spec lead, and JSR project lead) compiled a list of blog posts related to Rod Cope’s JavaOne presentation, titled “Groovy = Java Technology + Ruby + Python for the JVM”. Rod Cope, OpenLogic’s CTO and Founder, has already given a few talks about Groovy, and evangelizes its use at various events. But he doesn’t only “speak” about Groovy, he’s also eating his own dog food, because his company flagship product BlueGlue embeds over 100,000 lines of Groovy code!

I’m glad I just received my Maven Developer’s Notebook, from O’Reilly. My friend Vincent Massol and Tim O’Brien co-authored this great book on Maven, a definitely needed reading for all those who want to learn more about Maven, or who wants to get started quickly. I had the chance of being one of the reviewers and it allowed me to learn quite a few tricks in the process, at the same time I was converting one of my projects at work to a “mavenized” build process and integrating it inside Luntbuild for continuous integration. I particularly liked the “best practices” aspects both authors managed to give throughout the different labs. This book is a must read, go and get it at your nearest bookstore!

A new milestone of Groovy was released a few days ago. The general goal of this release was quality. 80-90% of our work was targeted at improving the user experience, as much as we could. One of the main complaints so far has always been regarding the ugly error reporting that Groovy was generating. Whether that be in the shell, or embededed, or when compiling your Groovy source code. It was pretty hard to figure out what the error was by looking at a meaningless message and hundreds of lines of exceptions.

I played with Lucene today to index a CSV file representing the Unicode characters metadata. Lucene is so easy and fun to use, that’s really the kind of libraries I like very much. I took some inspiration from my friend Jeremy who played with Lucene and Groovy recently, by translating into Groovy some examples of Lucene in Action.

I’ve always been interested in i18n issues, charset/encoding malarkey, and so on. It’s always a pain to deal with… but it’s pretty damn interesting, and that’s often a problem that native English speakers overlook.

Recently, on Maven’s user list, someone wanted to be able to script Maven with Groovy, like it was already possible with BeanShell or Jython thanks to specific Jelly tags. But unfortunately, Maven didn’t provide that kind of support for Groovy.

But there are good news on that front since Jeremy Rayner contributed a nice Groovy Ant task.

That Ant task will be available in the upcoming Groovy release (jsr-02), so if you want to play with Maven and Groovy, you’ll have to build Groovy from sources in the meantime. But I’m going to reveal how to script Maven with Groovy in advance.

My little puzzle of the day is to find how to remove accents from a String. There are different alternatives, different strategies, but none really suits my needs – or my taste.

The naive approach is to use String.replace() to replace manually all characters, with a correspondance table, like “é” should be replaced with “e”, etc. That’s fine for some languages I know, like French or German, or even some latin languages, since we share the same alphabet. But with Russian, Greek, or some asian languages, my knowledge won’t suffice! So I can’t reliably produce a big hashtable with that knowledge. What a pity!