Releases

• The first release candidate of Spring Boot is out, including its lean Groovy support
• Grain releases are now available in Maven Central
• Andrés Almiray released version 0.3.0 of his Gipsy AST transformation for simplifying usage of the service provider interface system

Articles

• Pivotal posted Guillaume Laforge’s article on the 3 million downloads of Groovy last year and his analysis
• Kyle Boon describes how to use meta-annotations to reduce boilerplate code
• GVM, the Groovy enVironment Manager, is featured on the methods and tools website, thanks to an article from Marco Vermeulen
• At SpringOne2GX 2013, Ryan Vanderwerf explains how to create and deploy a Grails application on AWS VPC using various services such as RDS, S3, autoscaling, S3FS, EBS, etc.
• An infographic from Cygnet Infotech about 6 reasons why Grails is an awesome Java Web framework
• Bert Van Den Brande writes about using Spring Boot with Groovy

Presentations

• ZeroTurnaround published a decision maker’s comparison of Maven, Gradle and Ant + Ivy
• Simpler stored procedures with Groovy by Jeff Sheets from Object Partners
• Burt Beckwith explains the general process of creating a Grails plug-in, the different types of plug-ins, and how to deploy, release and test them.
• Will Buck provides advice for those interested to upgrade their applications from Grails 1.x to 2.x
• Venkat Subramaniam shows how to implement several design patterns, including some GoF ones, using Groovy’s dynamic nature and closures.
• Jim Driscoll shows how to create Napili, a small program accepting user scripts to control a turtle using GroovyShell, the Binding, overriding behavior with set/getVariable and invokeMethod, and more, recorded at GR8Conf US 2013

Mailing-list discussions

• Lari Otari from the Grails team is calling for feedback on areas where the Grails unit testing support could be improved

Tweets

• Surge in popularity for Gradle in the ZeroTurnaround analysis
• Cédric Champeau succeeded making Groovy build with JDK 8, a first step forward to adding further Java 8 support in Groovy
• Johannes Link is reworking his @TailRecursive AST transformation for integration in Groovy 2.3
• A funny GORM-like tweet to encourage people to order the second edition of the Grails quick-start guide book

Jobs

• A remote Grails engineer for Wixab

Other news

• As usual, the the Grails Diary is out, week 5 of 2014, by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen
• A new look for the GR8Conf Europe website

Books

• The final chapters of Grails in Action, 2nd edition are now in Manning’s Early Access Program. Peter Ledbrook tells us issues can be reported in their GitHub issue tracker (https://github.com/GrailsInAction/graina2/issues)

Events

• First meetup of the GR8 Ladies of Minneapolis on January 29th
• The Call for Papers for the GR8Conf Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 2nd-4th 2014) and GR8Conf US (Minneapolis, USA, on July 28th-29th 2014) conferences is now open
• The Call for Papers for the Greach conference (Madrid, Spain, on March 28th and 29th 2014) is also open, till January 31st

Back in 2012, I was pretty happy and proud to see Groovy being used more and more, and reaching 1.7 million downloads in 2012. But the competition with other alternative language, I was personally not sure how those figures would evolve over the course of 2013. Fortunately, thanks to the hard work of the Groovy core development team and the friendly community and ecosystem, I’m happy to report an impressive ongoing growth for 2013: Groovy crosses the 3 million downloads a year mark!

We all know the Groovy community is super active, buzzing with useful projects in the ecosystem, but it’s always interesting to see how our projects evolve in terms of usage. Guillaume Laforge, project lead of Groovy, computed some download statistics for Groovy, and showed Groovy almost doubled its downloads, from 1.7 million downloads in 2012 up to 3 million downloads in 2013! All that, thanks to the hard work of the Groovy core team and the friendly and supportive community.

Here’s the fourth edition of the Groovy Weekly column! The holidays are gone, and tons of news are here for your consumption.

Releases

• Jim Northrop released Caelyf 1.1.2, the lightweight Groovy web toolkit for Cloud Foundry

Articles

• Guillaume Laforge wrote a small tutorial on how to deploy a Ratpack application to Cloud Foundry, with a dedicated buildpack developed by Ben Hale
• Cédric Champeau blogs about the upcoming closure parameter type inference for Groovy
• Guillaume Laforge shares the notes of the last Groovy developer meeting in London prior to the Groovy Grails eXchance conference, covering various topics about the roadmap of Groovy 2.3 and Groovy 3.0.
• Peter Niederwieser authored a document explaining how to contribute to the development of the Spock testing framework
• Ken Kousen uses Groovy, POGOs, GSON and the Open Weather API
• Dustin Marx blogs about identifying Gradle conventions
• Noam Tenne explains how to register new Spring beans in Grails at runtime
• New Relic, the app performance management solution, adds Groovy and Grails support to its Java agent
• There’s now a TestFairy plugin for Gradle, to test Android application with the TestFairy platform
• Amit Jain from IntelliGrape, organizers of the GrailsConf India conference, is listing 15 reasons why developers should use the Grails web application framework
• Amit Jain from IntelliGrape is writing about Spock’s @ConfineMetaClassChanges annotation to make writing grails unit test easier
• The social value of Groovy and Grails in Brazil by Henrique Lobo Weissmann
• Dustin Marx explains how to customize the Gradle Java plugin
• Stergios Papadimitriou shows that Fast Fourier Transforms can be performed in GroovyLab faster than plain C, and as fast as optimized C routines
• Peter Ledbrook updated the Grails Searchable plugin installation instructions to show how to make it work with Grails 2.3
• Ondrej Kvasnovsky blogs about Grails integration with Vaadin
• A basic introduction to Groovy Closures by Alex Staveley

Presentations

• Grails and the realtime web, presented by Stéphane Maldini at SpringOne2GX 2013
• Jeff Brown presented polyglot web development with Grails 2, during SpringOne 2GX 2013
• Steve Pember discusses the architecture, the frameworks and Responsive Design principles to be employed while building a single-page JavaScript application., and why use Grails for that. Presented at GR8Conf US 2013

Screencasts

• Screencast of the awesome support of Gradle in IntelliJ IDEA 13

Mailing-list discussions

• Andrés Almiray follows up on the status of Griffon 2.0

Tweets

• A possible Spock contribution could be the development of a new website for Spock using the Ratpack web framework
• Peter Ledbrook mentions that the Lazybones templates for Ratpack are now managed in the Ratpack project. Also, new versions are available for the Ratpack 0.9.0 release
• Burt Beckwith warns Grails users to avoid save(failOnError: true) as exceptions are costly, as demonstrated in this article on the cost of using exceptions
• Baruch Sadogursky is a fan of the Ratpack framework and found its website one of the most stylish

Google+ post

• Mark Perry shows example of “lenses” and “state monads” for some more advanced functional programming with Groovy

Code snippet

• Václav Pech demonstrates use of GPars lazyTasks to lazily and asynchronously load mutually dependent components into memory
• Tim Yates rewrites Carin Meier’s (@gigasquid) fun presentation on Monads in Groovy
• Mike Mitterer shows how to show the Git tag version in your Gradle build version
• Tim Yates is also playing with functional lenses in Groovy

Jobs

• Looking for a Grails job in Gibraltar?
• A Grails engineering job at WIBAX in Milan, Italy

Other news

• As usual, the the Grails Diary is out, week 2 of 2014, by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen

Books

• Dave Klein and Ben Klein’s book, “Grails 2: A Quick-Start Guide”, is now in print and shipping
• Packt Publishing is looking for reviewers for the Groovy 2 Cookbook book

Events

• Luke Daley is returning to his native Australia, but before leaving, he’ll be giving one last talk at the London Groovy Grails User Group on Gradle, Ratpack and more, on January 20th
• The Call for Papers for the GR8Conf Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 2nd-4th 2014) and GR8Conf US (Minneapolis, USA, on July 28th-29th 2014) conferences is now open
• The Call for Papers for the Greach conference (Madrid, Spain, on March 28th and 29th 2014) is also open, till January 31st

Happy New Year best wishes are still flowing around, and new year resolutions have been sealed, but despite the busy times and good moments spent with our families, the Groovy ecosystem is still abuzz with news! You’d think it’d be a quiet third edition of the Groovy Weekly column, but no, we’ve all been busy with Groovy stuff! So what’s in store?

Releases

• Ratpack 0.9.0 has been released
• Peter Ledbrook published version 0.6 of Lazybones with support for multiple template engines
• Gernot Starke released v1.0 of pdfStamper, a small Griffon / Groovy-based utility to add page / chapter / header to pdf files
• Ken Krebs released his version of gsheets, a lightweight DSL wrapper over Apache POI, that is intended to make extracting data from, or pushing data to spreadsheets simple and declarative. It can be used with Groovy 1.8, Grails 2 and Java 6+.
• Yoshiya Hinosawa created a Gradle plugin for CoverAlls.IO, a service which gathers your code coverage for history and analytics purpose

Articles

• Alex Staveley covers Groovy’s “smooth operators”: Elvis, spaceship, safe navigation, spread, field access, method references
• Mark Perry blogs about referentially transparent input / output in Groovy
• Ben Limmer explains how to automatically publish to Sonatype with Gradle and Travis CI
• Michael Scharhag covers how to use Hibernate filters in Grails
• Cyril Mottier shows the Android Gradle build in action

Presentations

• In this SpringOne2GX presentation, Hans Dockter discusses build systems from a declarative vs. imperative perspective, the importance of a rich execution model and problems with POM, providing examples from Gradle, Maven and Ant
• Ken Sipe spoke about Spock during the JavaZone conference and covers mocking, stubbing and spying with Spock
• At GR8Conf US 2013, Marco Vermeulen explains using Cucumber and Groovy to apply BDD to a project, using Gherkin for writing scenarios, Groovy for step definitions, Spock for new features, and running Cucumber features
• At SpringOne2GX 2013, in his Application Architecture in Groovy talk, Dan Woods presented the strengths and flexibility in Groovy, including its dynamic nature, categories and mixins, to create a powerful, maintainable, and simple application architecture
• At GR8Conf US 2013, Zan Thrash advises on using some of the Node.js tools in order to improve Grails development: lint, concat, minify, testing JavaScript files, etc.

Mailing-list discussions

• Andrés Almiray gives a status on the future Griffon 2.0 and asks for feedback

Tweets

• Lazybones 0.6 is available through GVM
• Peter Ledbrook is adding Handlebars templating support to Lazybones
• Peter Ledbrook has pushed the Groovy Handlebars template engine into Bintray JCenter
• Anton Arhipov tweeted about the latest update of the GMaven Groovy Maven plugin
• Work has started on getting Ratpack in the TechEmpower framework benchmark
• Testing Ratpack modules and subsystem in isolations
• reStructuredText support via JRst and PegDown markdown parser are integrated into 0.6.0-SNAPSHOT of the Grain static website generator

Code snippet

• Kenneth Endfinger wished us all a Happy New Year with some Groovy asciiart (snippet)!

Jobs

• Antony Jones is looking for Grails contractors in London

Other news

• First Grails diary of the year by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen
• The Ratpack reference documentation has just had a facelift

Events

• GrailsConf India, organized by IntelliGrape Software, is taking place in New Delhi, India, on January 11th
• The Call for Papers for the GR8Conf Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 2nd-4th 2014) and GR8Conf US (Minneapolis, USA, on July 28th-29th 2014) conferences is now open
• The Call for Papers for the Greach conference (Madrid, Spain, on March 28th and 29th 2014) is also open, till January 31st
• Russel Winder is going to present a workshop on Spock at the Nordev conference
• Guillaume Laforge is speaking at JFokus 2014 about how to benefit form using Groovy, when, why and how
• Cédric Champeau is speaking (in French, at the Riviera Groovy/Grails user group) about how to contribute to Groovy

Don’t forget you can contribute to this weekly column of Groovy news, and that you can subscribe through a newsletter.

For the second Groovy Weekly column, on the eve of a new year, I’d like to wish you a very Groovy year, and share with you the following links, hoping you’ll have some spare time to look into them while you’re celebrating.

Releases

• A new project appeared on the Groovy ecosystem radar: Grain, announced by Victor Vlasenko on the Groovy mailing-list. Grain is a promising lightweight and yet powerful static website generator for Groovy which purpose is to make demanding site implementation an intuitive and enjoyable. Grain framework is equally well-suited for any static website, whether it is a complex and sophisticated company site or a simple and neat blog. The framework applies elegant website building concepts and allows to develop rapidly by making and seeing changes on the fly.
• Kunal Dabir created a Lazybone template for creating Groovy libraries readily publishable to Bintray, CI with Travis-CI, with a Gradle build and wrapper, a .gitignore file and more.
• Last week we mentioned the release of CodeNarc 0.20, and the associated CodeNarc Eclipse plugin has also been released
• Andrés Almiray released Gipsy, an AST transformation to simplify the use of the Service Provider Interface, similar to the Jipsy annotation processing toolkit he also created:
• Stergios Papadimitriou shares with us his project, GroovyLab, a MATLAB-like environment for the Java Virtual Machine. GroovyLab is an open source project based on the Groovy language. GroovyLab is efficient and can be an interesting open-source alternative to commercial packages, especially for the scientific community familiar with Java. The article introduces the architecture of GroovyLab and presents some examples of using GroovyLab to do useful work.

Articles

• A very extensive Groovy / Grails eXchange wrapdown post by Dan Woods covering all the talks he attended in detail
• Dustin Marx covers some Gradle command-line conveniences
• Dustin Marx reviews the book by Tim Berglund: “Gradle, beyond the basics”

Presentations from SpringOne2GX

• In this presentation on InfoQ, recorded at SpringOne2GX, Burt Beckwith discusses performing transactions in Grails, covering services, customizing transaction attributes (isolation, propagation levels), two-phase commit, using JMS, and testing the code
• Again recorded at SpringOne2GX, Paul King speaks about leveraging Groovy for capturing business rules, illustrated with various DSLs written in Groovy, highlighting several logic solving APIs and looks at the pros and cons of the various approaches (including tool support, flexibility, lock-in)

Interviews

• Stephen Chin interviews Luke Daley during the Devoxx conference, about Ratpack, Gradle, Geb

Mailing-list discussions

• Thibault Kruse discusses possible improvements to the groovysh command-line shell in this mailing-list discussion. Don’t hesitate to provide your input!

Tweets

• Luke Daley mentions his testing of the Waffle.IO service (a nice kanban board representation of Github issues) to organize and keep track of the backlog, ongoing development of Ratpack
• Dan Woods joins the Ratpack project as a new committer
• Ratpack now supports “fat jar” deployment
• Bert van den Brande used the Gradle Shadow plugin to create an executable JAR in no time
• Václav Pech, GPars project lead, is sprinkling a few Groovy’s few @DelegatesTo annotations over the GPars codebase operators to make them more @CompileStatic-friendly

Job

• Dan Woods relays the job post from @good_technology that is looking for a Grails developer in San Francisco, with mobile skills as well

Other news

• The last Grails diary of the year from by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen, if you want to be up-to-date on all Grails plugins news
• Bobby Warner contributes support for the PATCH method to the Ratpack project

Events

• GrailsConf India, organized by IntelliGrape Software, is taking place in New Delhi, India, on January 11th
• The Call for Papers for the GR8Conf Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 2nd-4th 2014) and GR8Conf US (Minneapolis, USA, on July 28th-29th 2014) conferences is now open
• The Call for Papers for the Greach conference (Madrid, Spain, on March 28th and 29th 2014) is also open, till January 31st

Happy New Year!

Almost the end of the year! On behalf of the Groovy development team, let me wish you the best and grooviest year for 2014!

Welcome to the Groovy Weekly news brief!

As the name implies, I’m going to try to make regular (in theory on a weekly basis) column of all the interesting news, presentations, code snippets, events, conferences related to the Groovy ecosystem.

And as a Christmas present, here’s the first issue!

Your feedback is important, and we’d be happy to hear about your thoughts on a regular column about Groovy related news: what are your expectations, what you’d like to hear about, what news bits are of higher interest to you, how you would like this information to be delivered, etc.

This is with great pleasure that the Groovy team is announcing today the release of Groovy 2.2, the latest version of the Groovy programming language.

Groovy 2.2 features:

• Implicit closure coercion
• @Memoized AST transformation for methods
• Define base script classes with an annotation
• New DelegatingScript base class for scripts
• New @Log variant for the Log4j2 logging framework
• @DelegatesTo with generics type tokens
• Precompiled type checking extensions
• Groovysh enhancements
• Bintray’s JCenter repository
• OSGi manifests for the “invoke dynamic” JARs
• And other minor bug fixes, enhancements and performance improvements

You can read more detailed release notes as well as have a look at all the JIRA issues fixed.

Following up my presentations from JAX London, I was interviewed about Groovy for JAXenter, with questions about what Groovy brings to Java developers, the recent surge in popularity as Groovy broke the TIOBE index top 20 languages, my favorite projects in the Groovy ecosystem.

Last week, I was in London for the JAX London 2013 conference. I gave a presentation on what makes the Groovy programming language… groovy! It’s essentially an introduction to Groovy, its language constructs, its ecosystem, etc. It’s not focusing particularly on new features or on metaprogramming, but tries to bring the audience to the boilerplate killer that is Groovy. I’ve posted the slides on SpeakerDeck and I embed them below:

I also had the chance to do a special speech at the London Java Community night during the conference about some (obvious) advice I could give developers, that I learnt through my working in Open Source, on the Groovy project, etc, illustrated with some quotes that I like. Again, slides embedded below: