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.

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With the recent release of Groovy 1.8.6, Groovy contributor Tim Yates, posted a few blog posts about some of the little useful enhancements that found their way in the release:

• Array#contains()
• Byte[]#encodeHex()
• the very useful collate() method

Tim also wrote a really great and detailed blog post explaining how to contribute to the Groovy project. Be sure to check it out if you’ve always wanted to contribute to the project. Tim shows how to get started, to propose a new feature or bug fix through JIRA, how to submit a pull request through GitHub, etc.

(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!

The Groovy development team is pleased to announce the release of Groovy 1.8.6.

Groovy 1.8.6 is a maintenance release essentially, with a few minor improvements and new features.

You can see the details in the JIRA release notes here:
http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10242&version=18245

You can download Groovy 1.8.6 in the Download section of the Groovy website:
http://groovy.codehaus.org/Download

Thanks a lot to all those who contributed to this release!

Next in line should be a new beta of Groovy 2.0 ;-)

Cédric Champeau, the Groovy core developer working on static type checking and static compilation for Groovy 2, recently gave a very interesting and instructive presentation on this topic at the Paris Groovy / Grails User Group, at the VMware offices.

You can have a look at his blog post about the presentation, including some additional comments regarding the method dispatch logic, some status update and directions.

And you should also have a look at Cédric’s analysis of the polls embedded in the presentation which asked a few questions about people’s preferences and expectations with regards to statuc type checking and compilation. Don’t hesitate to add your own input, as the poll is not closed and feedback is always welcome.

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:

While at the Groovy/Grails eXchange conference in London last month, I had the pleasure and honour to interview Hans Dockter, creator of Gradle and CEO of GradleWare. This interview was recorded and published by SkillsMatter.

Here’s a list of questions I had the chance to ask Hans:

• What’s Gradle?
• Any new about Gradle 1.0 and what’s being worked on?
• Why is Gradle using Groovy for its DSL?
• Is it possible to enforce conventions and standards à la Maven?
• Some words on IDE integration, roadmap, etc?

Check the video!

I’m very happy to announce the release of Caelyf 0.1, a lightweight Groovy toolkit for Cloud Foundry.

Caelyf is inspired by the Gaelyk project, and actually borrows most of its code base. Its goal is to let you write apps using Groovy scripts and templates, and then deploy them on the Cloud Foundry platform.

Caelyf is Open Source, released under the Apache 2 license.

Its source code is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/glaforge/caelyf Which means you will also be able to use the issue tracker from GitHub to file bugs or feature requests. And of course, if you want to contribute to the project, you’re just one pull request away!

The Groovy development team has just announced a joint release of Groovy 1.8.5 and a second beta of the upcoming 2.0 release.
We’d be happy to hear your feedback on the static type checking support and the experimental static compilation as well.
Here’s the official announcement:

The Groovy development team is happy to deliver two new releases as early Christmas presents: Groovy 1.8.5 and 2.0-beta-2.

While we work hard on Invoke Dynamic support, Static Type Checking and some experimental static compilation, we also find time to fix a good load of bugs and some minor improvements, as those two releases here are essentially minor incremental versions.

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