Here are the slides of the Groovy 2.0 presentation I’ve given at the 33rd Degree conference in Krakow.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Krakow, in Poland, to speak about the upcoming Groovy 2.0 release, at the 33rd Degree conference. I’m looking forward to meeting some of you there!
Here’s my abstract for What’s new in Groovy 2.0?

After a quick look at the key features of Groovy 1.8, including more readable Domain-Specific Languages, concurrency capabilities with the GPars library, and built-in JSON support, we’ll dive right into the most important features of Groovy 2.0!
A lot of the Groovy users are using the language as a Java scripting language, or sometimes as a better Java. First of all, not all of them need the dynamic capabilities, nor do they need all the library improvements provided by Groovy. For the latter, Groovy becomes more modular with smaller core modules that you can compose. For the former, in addition to its usual dynamic features, Groovy 2.0 adds static type checking, allowing you to ensure the correctness of your code before it ships and quickly spot early errors at compile time.
Also, not everybody needs dynamic features at all times, and the natural extension to static type checking is static compilation. With static compilation, Groovy 2.0 generates fast and performant bytecode like Java, and shields key parts of your code base from possible interferences of dynamic features, making critical paths both faster and immune to monkey patching. But when you need fast and performant dynamic logic, Groovy 2.0 also features the integration of the “invoke dynamic” support coming up with JDK 7 and beyond.

Read more...

(http://gr8conf.org/), the Groovy ecosystem conference series, are coming to Denmark and to the USA in a few months. You’ll learn about the latest novelties about tons of great Groovy-based technologies, like Groovy, Grails, Gaelyk, Gradle, GPars, Griffon, Spock, CodeNarc and more. It’s the best place to engage with the community, get to know the developers of those projects, and present your success stories, and more.

If you’re willing to speak at the conference about all those topics, please head over to the GR8Conf Call for Papers. And hurry up, there’s less than one week left!

GR8Conf Europe 2012 will take place in Copenhagen, on June 6th-8th. It’s the best place to meet all the Groovy folks, from Groovy itself, and from the wealth of the Groovy Ecosystem (Grails, Gradle, GPars, Griffon, Spock, GContracts, CodeNarc, Gaelyk/Caelyf, etc). It’s also the best opportunity to stay up-to-date with the latest developments, and discover what’s cooking!

The Call for Paper is open. So don’t hesitate to submit your proposal.

Some useful links:

Lors de l’enregistrement du 50ème épisode des Cast Codeurs au Paris JUG, j’ai eu le plaisir de faire un petit “one man show” comique (enfin j’ai essayé) sur notre métier d’informaticien, les tendances du moment, les news et autres scoops, etc.

Cette idée est partie d’une discussion avec Nicolas Martignole il y a 6 mois où l’on s’était dit que ce serait amusant de plaisanter un peu sur notre métier, les technos que l’on utilise, etc, et d’en faire une présentation humoristique. Et encouragé par les Cast Codeurs, je me suis lancé ce défi d’essayer de faire rire mon auditoire. A vous de juger si j’ai réussi ! Et je tiens à dire que les rires que vous entendrez sur l’enregistrement n’ont pas été rajoutés après coup ;-)

A week ago ended the latest edition of the Groovy & Grails eXchange 2011 conference in London, organized by the fine and lovely folks of SkillsMatter.

The organizers have a great setup which allows them to record and publish all the presentations almost live! And I’d like in this post to give you a link to each and every presentation that was given during the conference:

First day:

• Groovy 1.8, 2.0 and beyond by Guillaume Laforge
• Discobot: Groovy on Android by Erik Pragt and Marcin Erdmann
• A Gaelyk update by Guillaume Laforge
• Getting Groovy on the web and desktop by Andres Almiray
• Enterprise Gradle by Hans Dokter
• Advanced Gradle by Hans Dokter
• Painless desktop application development with Griffon by Andres Almiray
• Smarter testing with Spock by Luke Daley
• Asynchronous IO on the web with vert.x by Peter Ledbrook
• Just keep passing the messages with GPars by Russel Winder
• Powerful metaprogramming techniques with Groovy by Jeff Brown

Second day:

Warning: Sorry, this time, I’ll blog in French to share my slides of the presentation in French that I made yesterday at the Paris JUG about the PrettyTime library and the GPars concurrency / parallelism toolkit.

Hier soir, j’ai eu le plaisir de retrouver les passionnés du Paris JUG pour parler sur le thème des “petites librairies” utiles que l’on peut utiliser sur nos projets. J’avais proposé de parler de PrettyTime, qui permet d’écrire des dates relatives du genre “il y a 3 minutes” ou “dans 4 jours”. Et j’avais aussi suggéré de couvrir le sujet de la concurrence et de la parallèlisation avec GPars.

After sharing my slides for the DSL talk, and the Groovy update presentation, I’ll finish the tour with my presentation on Gaelyk.

Last week, at the SpringOne2GX conference, in Chicago, I gave an update on the new features of the recently released Groovy 1.8, as well as new features we’re working on for upcoming versions of the language and its APIs.

I’ve uploaded my slides on Slideshare:

I’m covering:

• Nicer DSLs with command chains
• Runtime performance improvements
• GPars bundled for taming multicore
• Closure enhancements (functional flavor and closure annotation parameters)
• The builtin JSON support
• The new AST transformations
• The alignment with JDK 7 (Project Coin)
• InvokeDynamic support coming up
• Static type checking
• And other minor improvements

It’s the conference season. After JavaOne, comes SpringOne2GX, in Chicago, this week (October 25th till 28th). Then Greach in Madrid (Spain), Devoxx in Antwerp (Belgium) and we’ll finish with Groovy/Grails eXchange in London (UK).

In Chicago this week, we’ll have 4 tracks dedicated to Groovy, Grails, and the big Groovy ecosystem (Gradle, Griffon, Spock, Geb…) over three days. That’s a lot of sessions and speakers ready to tell you all about what’s rocking in our world!