At JavaPolis ‘07, Dick Wall and Carl Quinn of JavaPosse fame have interviewed Guillaume Laforge, the Groovy project manager, and asked him about: the latest release of Groovy 1.5 and its novelties, more details on the come back of the ‘infamous’ for loop, the support of generics, the inclusion of closures in Java compared to Groovy’s closures, what Grails is and why it matters, how simple it is to leverage Grails in IT’s today infrastructure, the first class support of SQL and XML in Groovy, and also what the future will hold in the upcoming Groovy releases. Read more...

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. Read more...

If you are attending JavaOne and are already in San Francisco on Monday, you have to come to G2One, the Groovy and Grails meetup. The fine folks of the NFJS tour are hosting this meeting to gather the Groovy and Grails community. G2One is taking place at the W Hotel near the Moscone Center, on Monday evening. It’s the best opportunity to meet the people who make Groovy and Grails. Read more...

JAX is the most important Java conference in Germany. Every year, the organizers are running a contest to select the most innovative and creative projects. Fromover 40 proposals, the jury selected only ten nominees. Although great projects were selected, like the Matisse GUI builder in NetBeans, or the Nuxeo Enterprise Content Management solution, Groovy won the first prize! It is a great honor and a huge pleasure for us to receive such a prize, especially knowing the cool projects we were competing with, or the past winners like the Spring framework. Read more...

As always, lots of great things are happening in the Groovy and Grails community. If you’d like to stay up-to-date with the news, but if you don’t want to spend the whole day reading our high-traffic mailing-lists, you should certainly consider subscribing to one of these two resources: AboutGroovy: The community portal news site about everything Groovy and Grails, with frequent news items, podcast interviews, pointers to important resources. GroovyBlogs: A JavaBlog-like news agregator agregating the Grooyv and Grails mailing-lists feeds, and many feeds from famous bloggers spreading the Groovy and Grails love. Read more...

A few weeks ago at JavaDay 2006, a nice one-day conference organized by Sun, I’ve had the pleasure to meet James Gosling. James is the main creator of Java, and as I’m leading the Groovy project, and that the conference was happening in Versailles, city of the former French kings reknown castle, it’s like two language kings were meeting there! The picture taken on the left is from Chris, my friend and former colleague. Read more...

Yesterday, while blogging about the latest Groovy and Grails news, I mentioned the arrival of Groovy in Action soon to be published by Manning. And I forgot to show you the beautiful cover of the book. “Groovy in Action” is mainly written by Dierk Koenig, assisted with Andrew Glover, Paul King, Jon Skeet and myself. James Gosling was kind to write us a foreword for the book, and when I met him at JavaDay 2006 two weeks ago, it was such a delight to hear him telling me that he had used Groovy in a couple of projects at Sun and that he liked it very much! Read more...

A lot of great and interesting things are happening these days on the dynamic language front. Of course, for those who’ve been there or followed the blog reports and articles, this year’s been a pretty Groovy year so far, as I had promised last year. For instance, the 6 sessions about Groovy & Grails at JavaOne 2006 were well attended and packed. But that’s not all, Groovy and Grails are present at variousevents, such as the iX conference in Germany, where Dierk Koenig and Marc Guillemot will be speaking. Read more...

Scripting is definitely in fashion these days on the Java Virtual Machine. The JavaOne 2006 session catalog is online, and by browsing it, you’ll notice there are several sessions and BOFs dedicated to scripting. By simply searching for the word “scripting” in the content catalog viewer, you’ll count no less than 13 sessions speaking about scripting. This will be my first time at JavaOne. And a big first time since I’ll be presenting a session! 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. Read more...