Groovy

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. While he was too busy, I took the interim and maintained Groovy and managed to deliver a few successful betas with a lot of bug fixes. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In November, with Jeremy, we organized a JSR meeting, and I’ve recruited a few new commiters to help us solidify our groovy-core base, so that it is able to receive the upcoming new parser. And the JSR work and discussions never stopped.

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. We’re certainly not good at public relations these days, we’ve got some efforts to make on that front.

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.

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. I’m quite used to the tab key for that purpose, so I set the hexadecimal value to 0x09.

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!

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. It’s been a pretty busy year, in fact. Till the JSR got started, we were working like mad on Groovy, adding feature after feature, certainly not taking care enough of bugs, but still, that was a good time. Then came the JSR process, which somehow stopped all our efforts, because of uncertainty, and other considerations, like fear of not doing well with regards to that JSR process. Unfortunately, Groovy’s development almost stopped. Some of the core developers even left, because of the inactivity, and frustration of not being allowed to change things, or because of the lack of management in the project since our leader started working on other projects, taking all of his time.

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. So, of course, it’s Windows-only.

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.

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. Apart from helping you with your outline, with constant and useful feedback from your editors and so on, one of the things they do is to give you a nice welcome package as a new O’Reilly book author. Today, I just wanted to describe what they’ve just sent me.