I’ve just uploaded my JavaZone slides of the Domain-Specific Language presentation available on Slideshare. Abstract: Domain-Specific Languages are an “architectural hot-spot”, as coined recently by InfoQ editors. With dynamic languages such as Groovy, it is easy to create a mini-language modelling a particular business domain. Thanks to these DSLs, developers and subject matter experts will be able to share a common metaphor, to deliver, hand in hand, the final application to the end users. Read more...

The mythical eagle/lion is out the door, with a 0.0 version number! Griffon is a Grails-like framework for building rich Swing client applications (applets, webstart, standalone). Andres was hinting at the first release of this new project, and Danno just announced it officially after having shown some nice preview of what it’s all about by showing a Twitter client built with Griffon. The Groovy swing team’s long been hard at work to provide you with powerful declarative Swing UIs with the Groovy Swing builder, and they’ve now switched gears to go a big step further by really empowering developers to write, build and distribute clean MVC apps. Read more...

It’s a bit of a late notice, but if you’re in Paris these days, you may wish to come to the Paris JUG tomorrow night (Tuesday, September 9th). I’ll be presenting an introduction to Groovy (the dynamic language for the JVM), as well as a presentation on Grails (the agile and productive web application framework) with the help of my friend and former colleague Fabrice Robini. You can register here and get more information about the agenda of that Paris JUG night. Read more...

A few weeks ago on the Groovy mailing-lists, a user wanted to know a way to find which variables were bound or not in a Groovy script, in the context of some custom rules engine. In a Groovy script, names that are not local variables, method parameters, etc. can come from the “binding” associated with a script. This is the way we “inject” variables and values into a script. A usual technique for retrieving variables lazily (for instance when you don’t want to put in the binding a variable that is heavy to compute or retrieve) is to create a custom Binding class and override the methods for getting variables from it. Read more...

I had the pleasure to participate in OCTO’s IT University (Université du SI in French) a couple weeks ago. The conference was really great, and I think France really needed such a high-quality IT event as there was no real good event like that until now. So big kudos to the organizers. Apart from great food, excellent speakers covering interesting topics, I had the pleasure of spending time with my friends from the OSSGTP community (Vincent, Guillaume, Patrick, Mag, Didier, Fabrice, Erwan), with my former colleagues, and with some great guys like Ross Mason, Erik Meijer (with great tshirts as usual), and more. Read more...

If you’re in the North America and you want to get up to speed with Groovy and Grails, G2One, the Groovy/Grails company, has just announced its updated training schedule for this year. From August to November, we’ll be in: San Jose (CA) Chicago (IL) Orange County (CA) Austin (TX) Calgary (Canada) and Atlanta (GA) You can find the exact dates online. And you can already register for the San Jose and Chicago dates in August. Read more...

If you’re in Paris, next week, make sure you don’t miss the “Université du SI” (IT University) conference, organized by my former colleagues from OCTO Technology. This conference is going to rock! Quite frankly, I think France was seriously lacking a good IT conference, and I think OCTO is going to deliver on that promise. I’ve been told they are pretty soon running out of entry passes as we’re close to the deadline, so it’s your last chance to register. Read more...

This is with great pleasure that G2One and the Groovy development team announce the first beta of Groovy 1.6. Beyond the 73 bug fixes and 24 improvements listed in the release notes above, the main focus was on performance improvements. Compilation and runtime performance improvements As you may have already noticed with Groovy 1.5.5, the compiler is 3 to 5 times fasterthan in previous releases. This improvement is available both in this development version and in the 1. Read more...

If you’re going to JavaOne this year, and if you’re interested in Groovy and Grails, you can’t miss G2One’s free Groovy / Grails meetup, Monday evening, 7pm, at the W Hotel, across the street from Moscone. It’s going to be a great opportunity to meet the guys behind both Groovy and Grails, learn about the latest news about these projects, see some cool demos, and hear about customers who’ve decided to use Grails in their projects. Read more...

This week takes place the 2008 JAX conference, in Germany. Last year, Groovy won the first prize of the JAX innovation award, and this year, Grails was submitted and has just been nominated by the jury.Guillaume Laforge, Groovy project lead and initiator of the Grails project, will be at JAX this week and will represent the Grails team and project. From the nomination announcement: Now it is official: The ten nominees for the JAX Innovation Award. Read more...