Incredible, I’ve just learnt that Groovy was dead, according to Mike! So I understand that’s why Cédric would like to know the final date for the burial. It’s interesting to see how much pressure the Groovy project has on its little shoulders. So far, to my knowledge, I don’t really see any other OSS project for which the users and the blogosphere had so many expectations. Well, back in time, 6 months ago, yeah, we could’ve said Groovy was somewhat a zombie, but I don’t think that’s true anymore, with the latest months activity. Read more...

JetBrains improved the custom file type support in IntelliJ, in the Irida EAPs. If you have defined your Groovy syntax file correctly, you can have syntax highlighting, brace highlighting, and even… code-completion! In my Groovy syntax file (which works in Irida #3185), I defined two sets of keywords: one for the keywords of the language, and the other one for the Groovy methods, like each(), findAll(), etc. And guess what? Simply hit CTRL-Space as usual, and presto, you can complete your code. Read more...

When I’m on an old PC, what frustrates me a lot is when I can’t auto-complete file names or paths when I’m in a DOS Console. If your computer (an old Win2K box like I have at work) is not configured for completion, it’s easy to re-enable it by modifying two keys in the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor\CompletionChar HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor\PathCompletionChar To both keys, assign an hexadecimal value representing the key used for completing statements. Read more...

If you’re under Windows, and that you need to do some shell scripting with ActiveX/COM components, Scriptom will certainly help you. Today, my boss just asked me if we could use Scriptom to convert a Word document into an HTML equivalent. And I decided to see if that was possible. To my delight, my little Scriptom module, backed by Jacob, helped me solve this integration problem with only 6 lines of Groovy code! Read more...

First of all, I wish a Happy New Year to all my readers! The first days of a new year are often days of recollection, where we look back at the previous year. What happened? Was it a good year? Did we succeed in our endeavours? Any downside or missed target? Etc… Today, I want to give you some insight in the Groovy history, as it was written last year, in 2004. Read more...

During my three weeks break before my next job, I decided I’d work on two things: first, I’ll play with Groovy a little more (playing != fixing bugs like mad like those last two months to get beta-8 out in the wild), and I’ll work on my “Learning Groovy” book for O’Reilly. In this blog post, I’ll talk about my last two days playing with Groovy and… Jacob, a Java COM Bridge library developed by Dan Adler, to interact with Windows components. Read more...

Kjetil JD submitted a feature request on JetBrains’ tracker for adding Groovy support to IntelliJ: Integrated Groovy-support Integrated support for Java bytecode-based scripting languages should be better integrated in IntelliJ. Groovy is the only Java bytecode scripting language that has a backing JSR and should be the first to be implemented with proper support like Java and XML has. For the moment, the Groovy IntelliJ plugin is somewhat stalled, we didn’t make any progress on that front, so a little help from our JetBrains friends would be most welcome. Read more...

So far, I didn’t blog about our first ever Groovy Conference we held on November 11th and November 12th. But at least, here are some pictures taken there. I’ve created a Flickr account and put my pictures son it. Jeremy Rayner blogged about the conference, and also took some pictures, and wrote down a few notes about the conference.

A few months ago, O’Reilly contacted the Codehaus to find some Groovy experts for writing a book about Groovy, the scripting language for the JVM. I was very interested in writing such a book, and I asked another expert, Chris Poirier, if he’d fancy co-authoring the book with me, and he accepted. That’s how we started writing “Learning Groovy”, in the famous animals/learning series. This article is not about how to become an author, but rather, how O’Reilly helps you get up to speed with the task. Read more...

A year ago, James Strachan and Bob McWhirter gave birth to Groovy: a dynamic and agile scripting language for the JVM. Nobody really knows who is the father, and who is the mother, neither do we know how the fecundation happened. Anyhow, James always used to say that it was all Bob’s fault, but indeed, James had so many groovy ideas that it’s hard to believe it’s not his own fault. Read more...