C#’s fanatic Ted Neward is amazed at how cool C#’s anonymous generic methods are. He then gives an example of a little program that filters some entries according to a critiria, using some generic types and delegates. It’s about finding all persons from a set of persons whose last name is “Neward”. Sam Pullara even showed his own version of the same program in Java and explains that IntelliJ IDEAallowed him to type roughly 10% of the characters of the program thanks to the wonderful completion and code templating capabilities of that IDE. Read more...

With the recent release of Google Talk, the fine chaps at Google entered the Instant Messenging market. The most clever step in that direction was their choice of protocol for their IM solution: XMPP. XMPP was popularized and standardized through the IETF by the Jabber software foundation with its famous open, secure, ad-free alternative to consumer IM services like AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo (quoted from their site). A particular benefit of choosing an open platform is that it takes advantage of available client GUIs for instance, and moreover, it can leverage specific and standardized extensions of the XMPP protocol – called JEPs. Read more...

As stated on Javalobby: “The Guru of Groovy shares his Thoughts”! Well, it seems like I’m that Guru! And that’s been my first official interview. That was a quite fun and interesting exchange of mails between Andrew and me, and it allowed me to develop a few interesting points I never had time to explain. Andrew Glover, Vanward Technologies’ CTO, is a fan of Groovy. He wrote several great articles on DeveloperWorks in a “Practically Groovy” series". Read more...

Franck Rasolo, our IntelliJ expert, just released and announced the inital version of the GroovyJ IntelliJ IDEA plugin! The Groovy team is pleased to announce the first public release of GroovyJ, a plug-in that integrates the Groovy language into IntelliJ IDEA. You may browse the current GroovyJ status page which lists the features shipped with this initial release. In a nutshell, with GroovyJ: a default Groovy runtime is automatically installed as a global library Groovy files can be edited with some amount of syntax highlighting ‘Run Configurations’ can be created for runnable Groovy scripts Groovy scripts can be run with the output being captured in the embedded console window Groovy scripts located under module source/test folders will be automatically compiled when compiling modules Note: This plug-in is available through IDEA’s plug-in manager and requires IntelliJ IDEA 5. Read more...

The JavaOne crowd is applauding Groovy! And the blogosphere is full of friendly comments towards our dynamic and agile scripting language for the JVM. Jeremy Rayner (our co-JSR-241 spec lead, and JSR project lead) compiled a list of blog posts related to Rod Cope’s JavaOne presentation, titled “Groovy = Java Technology + Ruby + Python for the JVM”. Rod Cope, OpenLogic’s CTO and Founder, has already given a few talks about Groovy, and evangelizes its use at various events. Read more...

A new milestone of Groovy was released a few days ago. The general goal of this release was quality. 80-90% of our work was targeted at improving the user experience, as much as we could. One of the main complaints so far has always been regarding the ugly error reporting that Groovy was generating. Whether that be in the shell, or embededed, or when compiling your Groovy source code. It was pretty hard to figure out what the error was by looking at a meaningless message and hundreds of lines of exceptions. Read more...

I played with Lucene today to index a CSV file representing the Unicode characters metadata. Lucene is so easy and fun to use, that’s really the kind of libraries I like very much. I took some inspiration from my friend Jeremy who played with Lucene and Groovy recently, by translating into Groovy some examples of Lucene in Action. I’ve always been interested in i18n issues, charset/encoding malarkey, and so on. It’s always a pain to deal with… but it’s pretty damn interesting, and that’s often a problem that native English speakers overlook. Read more...

Recently, on Maven’s user list, someone wanted to be able to script Maven with Groovy, like it was already possible with BeanShell or Jython thanks to specific Jelly tags. But unfortunately, Maven didn’t provide that kind of support for Groovy. But there are good news on that front since Jeremy Rayner contributed a nice Groovy Ant task. That Ant task will be available in the upcoming Groovy release (jsr-02), so if you want to play with Maven and Groovy, you’ll have to build Groovy from sources in the meantime. Read more...

When working with Word documents, you’d often like to be able to extract relevant content automatically thanks to some scripts. That’s exactly what I wanted to do this afternoon. I have a Word document which contains some scripts written with a specific style, and I wanted to extract those snippets, so that I may be able to check that they compile or that the unit tests they represent be asserted successfully. Read more...

I think Angsuman diserve an answer. It looks like Groovy is in dire needs of a project manager. We’ve got one already. Of course, he’s been pretty busy with his Active* projects lately, but I think now he’s really back on the project. It’s often hard to cope with both a demanding job, and a demanding Open Source project. It’s tough to find time for both. Fortunately, he’s not alone on the Groovy project. Read more...