G2One, Inc. and the Groovy development team are pleased to announce the release of Groovy 1.5.5, a bug fix release of the 1.5.x stable branch. Beyond all the bug fixes and consistency improvements, the major aspect of this release is certainly the improvements in compilation speed. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve the performance of Groovy, we have worked hard on compilation speed, and we backported those improvements from the upcoming Groovy 1. Read more...

Sun engineer Matthias Schmidt has just published an article on the progress of the Groovy and Grails support in NetBeans. The Aquarium also features the ongoing work on support of Grails in Glassfish. On NetBeans front, Matthias Schmidt and Martin Adamek started working on a plugin back in November. You’ll need to use a NetBeans nightly build, and download the Groovy/Grails plugin from the updace center. The plugin already provides: Read more...

On Ajaxian, the other day, I spotted an article about JSON.Net, a project aiming at simplifying the production and consumption of JSON data for the .Net world, and I wanted to contrast what I’ve read with what we are doing with Groovy and Grails. I rarely speak about the Microsoft world, but the latest features of C# 3 are very interesting and powerful, particularly the anonymous types, their closures (whatever they are called), and LINQ for querying relational or tree structured data. Read more...

Domain-Specific Languages are a hot topic, and have been popularized by languages like Groovy and Ruby thanks to their malleable syntax which make them a great fit for this purpose. In particular, Groovy allows you to create internal DSLs: business languages hosted by Groovy. In a recent research work, Tiago Antão has decided to use Groovy to model the resistance to drugs against the Malaria disease. In two blog posts, Tiago explains some of the tactics he used, and how to put them together to create a mini-language for health related studies. Read more...

At JavaPolis ‘07, Dick Wall and Carl Quinn of JavaPosse fame have interviewed Guillaume Laforge, the Groovy project manager, and asked him about: the latest release of Groovy 1.5 and its novelties, more details on the come back of the ‘infamous’ for loop, the support of generics, the inclusion of closures in Java compared to Groovy’s closures, what Grails is and why it matters, how simple it is to leverage Grails in IT’s today infrastructure, the first class support of SQL and XML in Groovy, and also what the future will hold in the upcoming Groovy releases. Read more...

If you want to learn everything about Groovy and Grails, get in touch with all the projects committers and contributors, and have a great time, you should definitely not miss the Groovy / Grails Experience that will take place in Reston, VA, USA – February 21 - 23, 2008 There’s a pretty impressive list of speakers, and the session schedule looks pretty tasty. It’s the best opportunity to get the right information straight from the horse’s mouth. Read more...

It’s funny, but before working on the Groovy project, there was a song I’ve always liked: A Groovy Kind of Love, by Phill Collins. Do you think it was premonitory? That I’d work on Groovy? And speaking of Groovy love… I’ve come across some nice love messages towards Groovy that I wanted to share with you. Jorge Lugo, a software engineer in the Washington DC area, sums up pretty well the appeal Groovy has to Java developers: Read more...

A new source of information on Groovy and Grails has just been launched: the Groovy Zone. Rick Ross et al. have built upon the DZone community-driven linkblog, and JavaLobby, to create various “Zones” on numerous topics like Java, AJAX, CSS, and also Groovy and Grails. Andres Almiray, Steven Devijver and myself have become “zone leaders”, to shepherd the Groovy and Grails content. We had AboutGroovy where Scott Davis lists on the interesting news in the Groovy and Grails spheres, and Glen Smith’sGroovyBlogs blog aggrgator listing several super interesting blogs related to Groovy and Grails… and now we have the GroovyZone! Read more...

Jason Hunter from MarkLogic (and JDOM fame) has crawled the Groovy mailing-lists archives with his gorgeous MarkMail interface. Not all the archives have been indexed so far, as we’re still missing some older archives from before April 2004, but there’s already about 70K messages loaded. In the following screenshot, you can see the number of messages sent to the lists per month, across the course of time. An interesting remark: you’ll certainly have noticed the jump in the traffic around January 2007. Read more...

Graeme pointed me at a white-paperish article claiming Groovy would not be Enterprise-ready. If the article had been acurate, I would have welcomed it, and we could have found ways to improve Groovy to make it ready, but unfortunately, the author did not do his job properly, and only spread FUD by saying Groovy doesn’t hold to its promises. As this article is pretty thin on the technical aspects, I won’t explain why his conclusions are wrong – and also because Graeme explained this already. Read more...