I’ve had the pleasure of being invited at the Scala.IO conference to speak about the functional aspects of Groovy, as the conference was also open to other functional language. The Groovy programming language, since its inception, has always been pretty functional, in particular with the cornerstone that our Closures represent to serve as first-class citizen functions in the language. Inspired by other nice talks from Andrés, Paul, Arturo, I’ve created my own deck that I’ve posted on SpeakerDeck and that I embed below. Read more...

I was interviewed by Darryl Taft from eWeek yesterday about the Groovy programming language’s recent popularity boost. You can read the two-page long interview here: Groovy programming language sees major boost in popularity You’ll certainly be interested in the answers to some of the questions, in particular who’s using Groovy, or for which use cases Groovy is being used: — Why do you think Groovy has gained in popularity over the last year? Read more...

Yesterday, the Groovy programming language team released the release candidate for Groovy 2.2, as well as a bug-fix release of Groovy 2.1.8. Here’s the announcement I sent on the various communication channels: The Groovy team is happy to announce the release of the release candidate of Groovy 2.2, as well as a bug-fix release for Groovy 2.1.8. As you can guess with this release candidate, the final version of Groovy 2. Read more...

For the first time, Groovy enters the top 20 of the TIOBE programming language index, as you can see in the table below: As the headline and first paragraph indicate: TIOBE Programming Community Index for October 2013 October Headline: Lightweight Java language Groovy enters top 20 Programming language Groovy enters the top 20 for the first time. Groovy is an object-oriented scripting language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It is fully compatible with Java, making it easy to combine Java programs with Groovy. Read more...

The Groovy team is happy to announce the releases of the second beta of Groovy 2.2, along with a bug fix release of Groovy 2.1.7. We’re close to moving towards RC mode for the upcoming Groovy 2.2 release, and we’d be happy to hear about your feedback about this new version when used in your projects. Please have a moment to test it against your code, and tell us if you notice any problem or regression. Read more...

Václav Pech just announced the release of GPars 1.1, the multi-paradigm concurrency and parallel Groovy-friendly toolkit: The GA release of GPars 1.1.0 has just been published and is ready for you to grab. It brings gradual improvements into dataflow as well as a few other domains. Some highlights: LazyDataflowVariable added to allow for lazy asynchronous values Timeout for Selects Added a Promise-based API for value selection through the Select class Enabled listening for bind errors on DataflowVariables Minor API improvement affecting Promise and DataflowReadChannel Protecting agent’s blocking methods from being called from within commands Updated to the latest 0. Read more...

I recently came across InstantServer.io, a nice little service that allows you to instantiate an Ubuntu server for testing, for 35 minutes, on Amazon EC2. You click on the green button, and you’re given an account and a password, as well as the details to connect onto the machine through SSH. Please note that the service seems to be victim of its success, as requesting a new server takes more and more time it seems. Read more...

GR8Conf Europe 2013 was such a blast! With close to well over 160 attendees, the conference was a real success, and went flawlessly thanks to the great organization of Søren and his crew. Big congrats to his team! And for the 5th anniversary of the conference, the Groovy cakes were so delicious! It was a pleasure to be back in Copenhagen to meet all my friends from the Groovy community. Read more...

On the Groovy project team, we were wondering about which base JDK to support. So far, even the latest and greatest Groovy (version 2.1.4 just released today), we still support JDK 5 — despite being an End-of-Life’d product for a long while already. At conferences, I often ask the question on which versions of the JDK attendees are using, locally and in production, and it seems that JDK 5 has almost totally vanished off the face of the planet, but despite JDK 7 being quite mature now, it’s still JDK 6 that’s more widely deployed. Read more...

This is with great pleasure that the Gaelyk team announces the release of Gaelyk 2.0, the lightweight toolkit for developing applications on Google App Engine with the Groovy dynamic language. For the impatient, go directly to the download page! It’s been long in the making, and there are quite a lot of new features to speak about, like the migration to Groovy 2.1 and GAE 1.8, the new Search DSL, improvements to the URL routing system, various performance optimizations, and more. Read more...