It’s the conference season. After JavaOne, comes SpringOne2GX, in Chicago, this week (October 25th till 28th). Then Greach in Madrid (Spain), Devoxx in Antwerp (Belgium) and we’ll finish with Groovy/Grails eXchange in London (UK). In Chicago this week, we’ll have 4 tracks dedicated to Groovy, Grails, and the big Groovy ecosystem (Gradle, Griffon, Spock, Geb…) over three days. That’s a lot of sessions and speakers ready to tell you all about what’s rocking in our world! Read more...

The Groovy development team has just released Groovy 1.8.3 and 1.9-beta-4. For the impatients: download it on the Groovy download page check the JIRA release notes for 1.8.3 and 1.9-beta-4 or read the official announcement Those two releases are essentially about bug fixes and minor enhancements, but we also have interesting developments going on for static type checking your Groovy code, and for invoke dynamic support for performance of our dynamic core. Read more...

Google announces Dart, at the Goto Conference: a new programming language for “structured web programming”, for building web applications. Google also launched the Dart website, where you can read about the rationale of the language, the specification, and play with some live examples. The team behind Dart Reknown engineers Lars Bak and Gilad Bracha are on stage to present the language. Lars Bak worked on many virtual machines like Sun’s HotSpot or more recently Google V8, whereas Gilad Bracha is also famous for his work on the Java specification, his Smalltalk background, and the creation of a recent language called Newspeak (a flavour of Smalltalk). Read more...

The now famous GR8Conf conference dedicated to all things Groovy, is now coming to Australia, as announced on the GR8Conf blog! It will take place in Canberra, side by side with the Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC), on November 15th. The GR8Conf Australia website is already up and is running a Call for Papers. So if you have a presentation on Groovy, Grails, Griffon, Gradle, Spock, CodeNarc, Gaelyk, etc, with introductions, deep dives, case studies, and so on, feel free to submit a talk! Read more...

Groovy is a powerful language that gives the opportunity to its users to plugin into the compilation process to create what we call AST transformations, ie. the ability to customize the Abstract Syntax Tree representing your programs before the compiler walks this tree to generate Java bytecode. Since Groovy 1.6, many useful such transformations have been added to Groovy, like @Delegate to implement delegation, @Immutable to make your types immutable, or @Grab to add dependencies to your scripts, and many more. Read more...

The Gradle project is moving quickly towards its final version and we hear more and more projects adopting or migrating to Gradle for their build and project automation. Gradle founder Hans Dokter pushed very interesting posts those past days: On our way to Gradle 1.0: where he explains the current features being worked on before being able to reach 1.0, with a strong focus on three key aspects: the new dependency cache, the daemon, and performance improvements. Read more...

Groovy completed successfully its move to the Git SCM this summer, thanks to Matthew’s help. For helping everybody get up-to-speed with Git, I’ve added a page about Git on the Groovy wiki. We also now have a “groovy” organization on GitHub: https://github.com/groovy/groovy-core Our three main branches have been pushed there: master, GROOVY_1_8_X and GROOVY_1_7_X. But I’ve not pushed the tags though. The GitHub repository serves as a mirror, and the Groovy despots will be able to regularly push the latest changes to GitHub, and deal with pull requests and such. Read more...

As soon as I heard about the opening of the Google+ APIs, letting us access public posts in our Google+ streams, I wanted to play with them, and integrate my posts in my social stream on my blog. First of all, a little screenshot, where you’ll see the Google+ item at the bottom: Now, a bit of code? Yeah, of course. First of all, you’ll need to follow the explanations of the Google+ API portal to get your own API key (I’ll hide mine in this example so you don’t use mine). Read more...

I’ve just come across eWeek’s latest article on programming languages trends, and they announce that Groovy is the fastest growing language! The data shows the percentage of jobs that have increased (or decreased) for various programming languages since November 2009. In the time frame this slide show depicts, Groovy saw the largest increase in jobs, followed by C# and—surprisingly—COBOL. Of course, we still have a lot of work to do to continue growing, and stay the most popular and successful alternative language for the JVM, but it’s great to see such confirmations on a famous online business journal. Read more...

In the coming months, the Groovy team will be working on a nicer website with a web designer and better and up-to-date documentation. Obviously, this will take quite some time (especially for the content, more than for the look), but in the meantime, I wanted to refresh the look of the Groovy website a bit. So I spent several hours today and tonight playing with CSS3! I used Twitter’s Bootstrap grid system which is quite neat. Read more...