Groovy, the Java-like dynamic language for the JVM, matures over time like good wines. After the successful release of Groovy 1.0 in January 2007, the next major milestone with the 1.5 label already hits the shelves. With it, come several interesting novelties that we will examine in this article. The major addition to the language is the support of Java 5 features with annotations, generics and enums, making Groovy the sole alternative dynamic language for the JVM fully supporting frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, JPA, Google Guice, or TestNG. Apart from the new Java 5 features, a few syntax enhancements find their way in the language, as well as a more powerful dynamic behavior customization, a Swing UI builder on steroids, and improved tooling support.

My announcement of the release of Groovy 1.5 triggered the publication of an article that I wrote for InfoQ detailing the new features in this new release. If you want to know what it contains, I invite you to read my article on InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/articles/groovy-1.5-new

And if you want to know a bit more about the Groovy language history, or about my reasons to be part of this project, or if you want to know more about the founders behind G2One, the Groovy and Grails company, here are a few pointers you may be interested in:

G2One, Inc., the Groovy & Grails professional services company, and the Groovy development team are proud to announce the release of Groovy 1.5.

Groovy is a dynamic language for the JVM that integrates seamlessly with the Java platform. It offers a Java-like syntax, with language features inspired by Smalltalk, Python or Ruby, and lets your reuse all your Java libraries and protect the investment you made in Java skills, tools or application servers. Groovy can be used for various purposes, from adhoc shell scripting leveraging Java APIs, to full-blown web applications built on Spring and Hibernate through the Grails web framework. It can also be integrated very easily in your applications to externalize business logic, create Domain-Specific Languages, or to provide templating, XML parsing capabilities, and much more.

As we’ve announced it on the Groovy and Grails mailing-lists today, G2One, Inc. is born. Founded by Graeme Rocher (ex-CTO of SkillsMatter and Grails project lead), Alex Tkachman (ex-COO of JetBrainsmakers of the best Java IDE in the world) and myself (Software Architect at OCTO, Groovy Project Manager and JSR-241 Spec Lead), the company will provide training, support, consulting, and commercial products around Groovy and Grails, making G2One the official source for Groovy and Grails expertise!

It’s going to be a wonderful new adventure. After years spent working on Groovy at nights and week-ends, it’s going to be pretty refreshing, and it’s going to be a great opportunity to shift gears to spread the good word, iron out both projects, and at last working full-time on my pet projects.

Dear Groovy community,

Groovy 1.1-beta-3 is there, paving the way for an RC-1 in the following weeks, and if all goes well, for 1.1-final in October, right in time for the Grails eXchange conference that takes place in London. This conference will also be the opportunity for the Groovy developer team to meet for the fourth Groovy Developer Conference! With Groovy 1.1 released by then, it’ll be time to think about what’s going to happen for the next major version of Groovy.

The Groovy team is pleased to announce the release of Groovy 1.1-beta-2, yet another step on our aggressive roadmap towards the release of Groovy 1.1 in October.

For this release, I would like especially to highlight two key contributions to the project:

• First of all, after we’ve added Java 5 annotation support in Groovy 1.1-beta-1, this time, it was generics’ turn. Thanks to the help of some JBoss developers who’ve integrated Groovy in JBoss Seam, we’ve been able to test our support for annotations and generics, and to make sure we would release a quality milestone to our users. Groovy is the first alternative dynamic language for the JVM that supports annotations and generics, so that you can integrate Groovy with any Enterprise application frameworks like EJB 3 / JPA, JBoss Seam, Google Guice, Spring, etc.
• Secondly, I’m very happy to report the contribution of JetBrains to the development of Groovy. While working on the IntelliJ IDEA plugin for Groovy and Grails, the talentuous JetBrains team provided us with a joint Java/Groovy compiler! No more nightmare to cleanly separate Java and Groovy code to avoid cyclic references and tedious build configuration, you can now use the Groovyc compiler to compile both Groovy and Java sources in a single step.

Apart from those two great contributions that we have integrated in the project, we’ve worked on many other areas since the release of the first beta:

Funny quote on the Groovy user mailing-list, when someone was complaining that IntelliJ IDEA wasn’t Open-Source:

I want a platform that “just works” i don’t care what it looks like underneath. It is why I have a Mac with Mac OS X and why I use IntelliJ IDEA. Eclipse is the PC of IDEs. When you’re younger and have the time and energy to spend hours settings things up, dealing with driver problems (read plugins), install things over and over and deal with the incomptabilities between different drivers (read plugins) you’re ok with a PC (read Eclipse)

Read more...

If you are attending JavaOne and are already in San Francisco on Monday, you have to come to G2One, the Groovy and Grails meetup. The fine folks of the NFJS tour are hosting this meeting to gather the Groovy and Grails community. G2One is taking place at the W Hotel near the Moscone Center, on Monday evening. It’s the best opportunity to meet the people who make Groovy and Grails.

Will be present for presentations, demos, and panel discussions:

After Groovy was awarded the first prize of the JAX conference in Germany last week for being the most innovative and creative project in 2007 in the Java community, we’re pleased to announce therelease of Groovy 1.1-beta-1.

This release is the first beta release after the release of Groovy 1.0. But it’s a very important release as we’ve been working on key features putting Groovy clearly as the de facto enterprise scripting solution. Indeed, Groovy is now the first and sole alternative language for the JVM that supports Java 5 annotations. Groovy 1.1-beta-1 also supports Java 5 static imports.

After Groovy won the JAX 2007 innovation award, I took some time to look at what was going on in the blogosphere. There’s always a lot of activity in the Groovy-sphere. It never ceases to amaze me how prolific the community is. Let’s list some of the interesting posts I’ve come across this week-end.

• Chanwit managed to make Groovy run on .Net! This is pretty cool IMHO. He used IKVM for that. You’ll have to try it out.
• Alex shows how to use the native Groovy mocks to mock properties.
• Andres has created a special Groovy applet to let you write Groovy code in your script tags in your HTML pages!
• Glen is having fun with Scriptom (Groovy COM/ActiveX module) to synchronize his Remember the Milk todo list, with Outlook.
• Danno is comparing the upcoming Java closure notation with Groovy’s closure notation. I’m sure you’ll easily know which one is the sexiest and how a language that supports weak typing can be more concise and expressive.
• Warner experiments with Higher-Order Messaging with a Groovy implementation.

Next week should be pretty interesting too as we’re going to release the first beta of Groovy 1.1 in time just before JavaOne where there will be a lot of sessions dedicated to Groovy and Grails. Groovy will be the first alternative language for the JVM to support some Java 5 features. Groovy 1.1 supports annotations and static imports. If you plan to use another language than Java and leverage other key frameworks using annotations like Spring, EJB 3 / JPA, TestNG or Guice, your best option will be Groovy as it will be the sole alternative language supporting those frameworks.