A few months ago, O’Reilly contacted the Codehaus to find some Groovy experts for writing a book about Groovy, the scripting language for the JVM. I was very interested in writing such a book, and I asked another expert, Chris Poirier, if he’d fancy co-authoring the book with me, and he accepted. That’s how we started writing “Learning Groovy”, in the famous animals/learning series.

This article is not about how to become an author, but rather, how O’Reilly helps you get up to speed with the task. Apart from helping you with your outline, with constant and useful feedback from your editors and so on, one of the things they do is to give you a nice welcome package as a new O’Reilly book author. Today, I just wanted to describe what they’ve just sent me.

Ever had to work collaboratively, concurrently on the same document in real-time? So far, the offering for dealing with collaborative documents authoring is rather oriented towards an asynchronous mode.

You have Microsoft Word which allows you to make revisions, changes, highlights. You can use the good old email system by sending mails in a ping-pong way (no concurrent modifications allowed). You may also use a versioning system such as CVS or Subversion to edit documents in parallel and merge both work copies.

A year ago, James Strachan and Bob McWhirter gave birth to Groovy: a dynamic and agile scripting language for the JVM. Nobody really knows who is the father, and who is the mother, neither do we know how the fecundation happened. Anyhow, James always used to say that it was all Bob’s fault, but indeed, James had so many groovy ideas that it’s hard to believe it’s not his own fault. He kept saying: “Wouldn’t it be groovy if we could do this and that…”. Hence the name “Groovy”. That’s roughly how it all started.

Pour mes premiers essais de peinture à l’huile, j’ai choisi une vue plutôt originale de la région de Vézelay (dans l’Yonne), en prenant le contre-pied des angles classiques qui se tournent vers la basilique. J’ai décidé de peindre le point de vue que l’on voit à partir des hauteurs.

La peinture à l’huile est un médium particulièrement agréable à peindre. Les mélanges des couleurs dans le vif donnent des effets intéressants, de même que la superposition de couches, gras sur maigre, avec un fond bien sec. En effet, j’ai réalisé ce tableau en deux passes : une première pour le fond (ciel, champs et forêt), puis une seconde couche pour les feuillages des arbres, ainsi que le petit village.

DamageControl, I believe, is one of the great tools an Open Source project must have. For those who don’t know this great project hosted at Codehaus, it is one incarnation of a continuous integration system, like CruiseControl or others…

Basically, this is a tool which allow developers to make their project build automatically upon each commit to ease integration. Each time a modification is done on your Source Control Management system, it triggers a build. It’s particularly handy when associated with a full build including test suites.

I am a JetBrains fashion victim. I’ve just received my JetBrains TShirt this morning.

It was quite early (say 8 o’clock) for a saturday when I’m used to wake up late late late, especially after coding Groovy late at night… when that damn postman rang at the door. I wanted to slaughter this bastard for waking me up that early… I even wanted to not open the door. But I remembered that I was supposed to receive a TShirt some day, thanks to my participation in a very private society of IntelliJ IDEA affictionados called “Team JetBrains”…

For the first time in Paris, an Open Source Software Get-Together was organized by Vincent Massol of Cactus fame and author of JUnit in Action book. It was a lot of fun to meet him and other French OSS developers. I though we weren’t numerous to work on Open Source projects in France, but after all, it seems I was wrong. Moreover, I was stunned to meet someone working for the same company as myself, and I didn’t even know him! The world is such a small place indeed.

My fellow readers might remember my problems with SSH which have often bothered me. I faced again a similar issue:

I wanted to upload a new Groovy snapshot Jar, before we release RC-1 next week. As a Groovy despot, with the help of some wonderful hausmates (particularly Trygve and Bob) I managed to authenticate myself with ssh-agent + ssh-add on the Codehaus server, so that maven doesn’t require me to enter my passphrase for my key.

Since Groovy’s move from one server to another, we could not deliver the latest jars. We’re sorry for that, but we’re doing our best to fix all the little issues you’ve encountered (broken links, missing jar, etc) It’s not without difficulty that I managed to upload the latest snapshot of groovy, but I’m glad to announce that there is a new groovy-1.0-rc1-snapshot.jar.

You can find it here:

http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/dist/groovy/jars/

If you’re still using beta-4, please upgrade to the latest snapshot. Though there are still some bugs we haven’t fixed yet regarding “verify errors” and such, this snapshot is already much more stable. Next week, we should release a new distribution.

Being a groovy despot, I was in the process of redeploying groovy’s web site and also the latest snapshot jars of the distribution which a lot of guys have asked for. But I was having some problems with my setup, ssh connection, maven goals, etc. With Trygve and Bob, we were chatting about that, and here is an interesting snippet of the ongoing discussion:

trygvis: bob: dist is a recursive symlink bob: yes, I know bob: it’s broken bob: I’ll fix it bob: and I’ll smack the next person who tells me about it trygvis: DO IT NOW! [Guillaume] LOL :-))) bob: FUCK YOU trygvis: OK!!

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