Since I started using Gradle for building my projects, as soon as I needed to create a brand new project from scratch, I wished that Gradle guided my hand and created the right directory structure and minimal Gradle build script.

A bit less than two years ago, I was inspired by Dierk’s gist providing a basic build that provided two tasks, one for creating the directory layout, and the other one to create the Gradle wrapper. I turned that gist into a blog post of my own, with just minor version updates, as I wanted to remember how to do that the next time I’d create a new Gradle-based project.

The Groovy team is always looking at ways to further improve and encourage the collaboration and contributions from the community.

Today, the we are** looking for a sponsor for a dedicated server** that would host our new Continuous Integration server. If you or your company is interested in helping Groovy by contributing hardware and/or hosting, please contact us.

The details of the project are available here.

On behalf of the Groovy team, thanks in advance for your help and support!

Like every year, GR8Conf Europe takes place in the beautiful city of Copenhagen in Denmark. It’s where all the talented and cool Groovy ecosystem folks meet, and spread the love about their technologies, including Groovy, Grails, Gradle, Spock, GPars, and more.

I’ll be speaking about the latest developments on the Groovy 2.x branch, and what our plans are going forward. You can also have a look at the preliminary agenda published on the GR8Conf website, to see familiar names like Jürgen Höller, Venkat Subramaniam, Dierk König, Graeme Rocher, Burt Beckwith, Mr Haki, Luke Daley, Russel Winder… You’re sure to find some great content delivered by the experts themselves!

Here’s my announcement for the Groovy 2.1 release, and be sure to check out the full release notes of the release!

The Groovy team is pleased to announce the release of Groovy 2.1.0.
With over 1.7 million downloads in 2012, a strong ecosystem, Groovy continues its development and adoption, refines existing features and evolves new ones.

In this new release, Groovy 2.1:

• offers full support for the JDK 7 “invoke dynamic” bytecode instruction and API,

  Read more...

Since the world didn’t seem to end today, it is with great pleasure that we bring under your Christmas tree the following presents: the release of Groovy 2.1.0-beta-1 and Groovy 2.0.6.
Groovy 2.0.6 is a bug fix release for our Groovy 2.0.X line, whereas Groovy 2.1.0-beta-1 contains new features.
You can download Groovy at the usual location: http://groovy.codehaus.org/Download

The JIRA release notes can be found here:

• Groovy 2.1.0-beta-1: http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&version=18598

• Groovy 2.0.6: http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&version=18852

More extensive release notes will be available for the final Groovy 2.1.0 release, but please let me highlight the following key new features:

Václav Pech just announced the final release of GPars 1.0, the concurrency and parallel toolkit for Groovy and Java.

We’ll bundle GPars 1.0 in the Groovy 2.1 distribution coming very soon!

Let me quote some of the key changes and enhancements of this release (quoting from the “what’s new” section of the user guide):

Asynchronous functions

• Allowed for delayed and explicit thread pool assignment strategies for asynchronous functions
• Performance tuning to the asynchronous closure invocation mechanism

Parallel collections

Read more...

Last week, I had the pleasure to attend and keynote at the 5th edition of the Groovy / Grails eXchange conference, in London. I presented a talk around the new features of Groovy 2.0 and the upcoming 2.1 release, as well as a few words about what’s coming up next.

You can watch the video online, as SkillsMatter, the organizer of the conference, have put all the presentations online in record time!

And you can have a look at the slides hosted on Speakerdeck below:

InfoQ is running a reader-driven survey titled “What’s your next JVM language”.

Among the candidates to be ranked, you’ll find:

• Groovy
• Java 8
• Ceylon
• Kotlin
• Clojure
• Scala
• Xtend
• Fantom
• Mirah

As well as the languages ported to the JVM like:

• JRuby
• Jython
• Javascript (Rhino and soon Nashorn)
• Erlang
• Scheme

The interesting aspect of the survey is that it’s not just a mere poll, but you can rank those JVM languages across two criterion: the percentage of lines of code (less or more), and the adoption (like now, in 3 months, in a year). It certainly gives more perspective than a mere poll on your favorite language. The downside might be that it’s too easy to rank the ones you dislike negatively without objectivity, but well, polls are like that too :-)

On Thursday, at 15:30 GMT+1, I’ll have the pleasure to present a Groovy 2.0 update presentation live, online, in the form of a webinar. The webinar will be showcased through webex here. The video will later be made available on SpringSource’s YouTube channel, for those who want to see it afterwards at a more convenient time.

In the meantime, here’s the title and abstract of that presentation:

What’s new in Groovy 2.0?

Groovy is a very popular alternative language for the JVM that continues to bring more developer productivity and more performance after each release. In this webinar, we’ll dive through the new developments in the recently released Groovy 2.0.

Read more...

Last week, I was in Washington DC for the SpringOne2GX conference.

I’ve had the pleasure of presenting twice: first time on an update on Groovy 2.0 (and a recap on key features of Groovy 1.8), and a second time with my friends and colleagues Paul King (Groovy core committer) and Andrew Eisenberg (Groovy/Grails Eclipse tooling lead) about Domain-Specific Languages in Groovy.

Please see the slides published below: