Groovy

There have always been a few irritating things to me in Java. However, working on Groovy made me go beyond these limitations, or all the useless boiler-plate code one has to write. If I had to ask for some new features in Java 7, that would certainly be:

• have closure support (or delegate or whatever you call that)
• native syntax for common data structures like lists and maps
• named parameters

Today, I’m going to say a few words about the last item on my list: named parameters.

A few weeks ago at JavaDay 2006, a nice one-day conference organized by Sun, I’ve had the pleasure to meet James Gosling. James is the main creator of Java, and as I’m leading the Groovy project, and that the conference was happening in Versailles, city of the former French kings reknown castle, it’s like two language kings were meeting there!

The picture taken on the left is from Chris, my friend and former colleague. Read his blog, it’s full of great content! Of course, you’ll have recognized James on the left, and me on the right… and not the reverse order ;-)

Yesterday, while blogging about the latest Groovy and Grails news, I mentioned the arrival of Groovy in Action soon to be published by Manning. And I forgot to show you the beautiful cover of the book. “Groovy in Action” is mainly written by Dierk Koenig, assisted with Andrew Glover, Paul King, Jon Skeet and myself. James Gosling was kind to write us a foreword for the book, and when I met him at JavaDay 2006 two weeks ago, it was such a delight to hear him telling me that he had used Groovy in a couple of projects at Sun and that he liked it very much!

A lot of great and interesting things are happening these days on the dynamic language front. Of course, for those who’ve been there or followed the blog reports and articles, this year’s been a pretty Groovy year so far, as I had promised last year. For instance, the 6 sessions about Groovy & Grails at JavaOne 2006 were well attended and packed. But that’s not all, Groovy and Grails are present at variousevents, such as the iX conference in Germany, where Dierk Koenig and Marc Guillemot will be speaking. Another great thing that happened just a few days ago was the very first Groovy and Grails seminarwhere Dierk and Graeme Rocher talked about Groovy and Grails!

Lots of things are happening to me these days. First of all, I just got married a week ago with the lovely woman I’ve been living with for a few years already. Tug, my friend & Groovy commiter came straight from England to our wedding and took some shots of Stéphanie and me. Thanks a lot to all our family and friends who were so kind to come celebrate this happy moment with us, and to all those who sent us their best wishes.

Groovy introduced the concept of builders a few years ago, and it’s great to see other dynamic languages borrow this concept. Functional languages have even already done things like that for decades! In the past, Groovy borrowed a lot of brilliant ideas to languages like Ruby or Smalltalk, and some times, that’s the reversed situation where others seem to borrow ideas from Groovy.

• JRuby created a clone of our AntBuilder
• Ruby/Rails’ve got their own Ruby builders
• And I just came across an article today showing some builders in JavaScript as well with the JavaScript DOM builder

Grails also makes heavy use of the builder concept by letting users easily create Hibernate criteria queries, define domain classes constraints, or specify AJAX XML fragments. The builder concept is really a creative way to create fluent APIs and DSLs. I’m sure we’ll find other great usage scenarios for it.

After my interview back in august 2005, I’m happy to let you know about my latest interview I’ve just made for IndicThreads. In this interview, I’m speaking of course about Groovy and Grails, our innovative and advanced web framework lead by Graeme Rocher.

Scripting is definitely in fashion these days on the Java Virtual Machine. The JavaOne 2006 session catalog is online, and by browsing it, you’ll notice there are several sessions and BOFs dedicated to scripting. By simply searching for the word “scripting” in the content catalog viewer, you’ll count no less than 13 sessions speaking about scripting.

This will be my first time at JavaOne. And a big first time since I’ll be presenting a session! Along with Tugdual Grall from Oracle, we’ll be presenting TS-1246 entitled “Simplify Enterprise Development With Scripting” in the “Core Platform, JAVA SE” track. The abstract of the session is:

As a gift for mentoring students for the Google summer of code 2005 around some project ideas for Groovy, I just received a nice tshirt roughly on time for Christmas!

I’ve just come across a clone of Groovy’s AntBuilder. It’s being built with JRuby and allows you to write your build scripts in JRuby by reusing Ant’s tasks.

That was a pleasure to see Ruby inspired by our concept of builders, and now, they also copy our own builders. I’d simply say that imitation is the best form of flattery. Kudos guys!