I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Rick Hightower for InfoQ, on the features of Groovy 1.8, and also what we’re working on for Groovy 2.0. If you’re interested, here’s the article: Latest Happenings and Future of Groovy 1.8, 2.0 and Beyond

Dierk published a gist on GitHub with a handy Gradle build script to help you bootstrap a Gradle-built project from scratch, without having to create the directory layout manually, or install the Gradle wrapper. This is pretty neat and should be integrated in Gradle to ease the creation of projects! I’ve updated the gist with a more recent version of Groovy and Gradle. And so that I never forget about this handy Gradle build script, I’m blogging about it and reproducing it here, to save me precious minutes finding it again the next time I need it! Read more...

In a recent article, I was complaining about the new Google App Engine pricing policy. Obviously, as I have a few applications deployed on App Engine, and as I’m developing Gaelyk, a lightweight toolkit for this platform, I was worried about being heavily affected by those changes. In this article, I’d like to do a short summary of my experience so far. I have close to 10 applications deployed on Google App Engine. Read more...

Gaelyk 1.1 has just been released! Gaelyk is a lightweight toolkit for writing and deploying Groovy apps on Google App Engine. In this version, all the components have been updated to their latest versions: Groovy 1.8.4 GAE SDK 1.6.0 This blog is now running Gaelyk 1.1 pretty happily! You should be able to see the announcement on the Gaelyk Google group for the details, but here’s the list of changes: Read more...

On this post on the Groovy website, we’ve announced the releases of Groovy 1.8.4 and the first beta of 2.0, as well as cover some updates on the roadmap. In a nutshell, the big highlights are the static type checking support and invoke dynamic support. We’re also going to investigate whether it makes sense to also cover static compilation. And we’ve also announced a new version numbering scheme, to move Groovy forward. Read more...

Warning: Sorry, this time, I’ll blog in French to share my slides of the presentation in French that I made yesterday at the Paris JUG about the PrettyTime library and the GPars concurrency / parallelism toolkit. Hier soir, j’ai eu le plaisir de retrouver les passionnés du Paris JUG pour parler sur le thème des “petites librairies” utiles que l’on peut utiliser sur nos projets. J’avais proposé de parler de PrettyTime, qui permet d’écrire des dates relatives du genre “il y a 3 minutes” ou “dans 4 jours”. Read more...

With Google+ releasing its new “page” feature, I’ve created a page for the Groovy project on Google+. The idea is to post some regular updates on what’s going on in the Groovy project, its ecosystem, and share any interesting article that’s of interest to those using Groovy.

After sharing my slides for the DSL talk, and the Groovy update presentation, I’ll finish the tour with my presentation on Gaelyk.

Last week, at the SpringOne2GX conference, in Chicago, I gave an update on the new features of the recently released Groovy 1.8, as well as new features we’re working on for upcoming versions of the language and its APIs. I’ve uploaded my slides on Slideshare: I’m covering: Nicer DSLs with command chains Runtime performance improvements GPars bundled for taming multicore Closure enhancements (functional flavor and closure annotation parameters) The builtin JSON support The new AST transformations The alignment with JDK 7 (Project Coin) InvokeDynamic support coming up Static type checking And other minor improvements

With my friend Paul King, we ran our Groovy Domain-Specific Languages talk again this year in Chicago, for the SpringOne2GX conference. I’ve uploaded the slides on Slideshare, and Paul has pushed the examples on Github. The room was packed, and we had lots of fun doing our little dialogue between the customer and Groovy DSL developer, improving our DSLs, showing new techniques along the way, to suit the requirements as they evolved. Read more...