DamageControl, I believe, is one of the great tools an Open Source project must have. For those who don’t know this great project hosted at Codehaus, it is one incarnation of a continuous integration system, like CruiseControl or others…

Basically, this is a tool which allow developers to make their project build automatically upon each commit to ease integration. Each time a modification is done on your Source Control Management system, it triggers a build. It’s particularly handy when associated with a full build including test suites.

Since Groovy’s move from one server to another, we could not deliver the latest jars. We’re sorry for that, but we’re doing our best to fix all the little issues you’ve encountered (broken links, missing jar, etc) It’s not without difficulty that I managed to upload the latest snapshot of groovy, but I’m glad to announce that there is a new groovy-1.0-rc1-snapshot.jar.

You can find it here:

http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/dist/groovy/jars/

If you’re still using beta-4, please upgrade to the latest snapshot. Though there are still some bugs we haven’t fixed yet regarding “verify errors” and such, this snapshot is already much more stable. Next week, we should release a new distribution.

Based on a suggestion made by Jamie McCrindle, I decided it was time to add some missing Groovy methods related to sockets.

So far, I have added a bunch of IO/streams methods enhancing the JDK core classes, but there were no methods dealing with sockets. But now, this time is over.

I have added two methods:

• Socket.withStreams(Closure) which takes a closure as argument, and has acces to an input stream and an output stream, and
• ServerSocket.accept(Closure) which takes a closure argument which uses a socket as argument

What’s better than a sample code to illustrate that ? Hey, we’re going to implement a simplistic Hello World web server. Here it is…

Over the week-end, I implemented new groovy methods, as defined in GROOVY-208 Plus a few complementary methods.

• getText():
  • BufferedReader.getText()
  • File.getText()
  • File.getText(encoding)
  • Process.getText()

You can now easily read the full content of a file or of a buffered reader and get it as a String.

// retrieve the content of the file  
def content = new File("myFile.txt").text  
// you can specify the encoding of the file  
// note that since getText() has a parameter,   
// you cannot call it with something like text("UTF-8")   
content = new File("myFile.txt").getText("UTF-8") 

There is also a getText() method on Process which gathers the output of a process:

When you want to make some optimizations to your code, you often use the good old System.currentTimeMillis() method to time certain parts of your application. I wanted to do a similar thing when hacking some Groovy scripts recently, and the idea came to me that I could simply create a timing closure! So here it is, for your eyes only:

timer = { closure ->
    start = System.currentTimeMillis()
    closure()
    println System.currentTimeMillis() - start
}

Then you can use your brand new timing closure:

A year ago, Codehaus saw the light of day. And since, it gathered a lot of bright and talented persons working on innovative and very good quality projects. And moreover, those projects have a friendly licence scheme (I’m not a GPL/LGPL lover).

For a few months, I’ve been part of the Hausmates, thanks to my efforts in developing some code for Groovy, and I’m really proud of beeing part of it.

I wish a very happy birthday to Codehaus, and to all those who made it happen. Thank you Bob, and thank you James for Groovy ;-)

Perhaps you noticed recently that there’s a new interesting page on Groovy’s website ? Well, all pages are interesting of course! But there’s a new page describing the Groovy methods enhancing the core JDK classes.

In groovy, you have additional methods that you can call on standard Java classes. For instance, you can use the eachLine() method on java.io.File. With this method, you’ll be able to easily read a text file line after line, and do whatever with this line inside a closure without having to care about things like closing streams. Let’s illustrate this with an example :

Yesterday, I was granted commit rights on the Groovy source tree, at Codehaus. Of special interest for me :

• I developed a utility class which helps Groovy create new Readers for text files with the correct encoding already set (I’m really keen on charset/encodings issues),
• Adding some new Groovy methods to the core JDK classes,
• Working on an automatic documentation generation engine “a la” Javadoc, so that it may be possible to browse all the methods that have been added to the core JDK classes.

James asked me if I wanted a CVS access to deal with those matters of interest instead of tunneling through him, and I gladfully accepted. But, alas, here starts the nightmare…

In the IntelliJ forums, I came across an off-topic (but funny) post by Robert Gibson who was wondering :

Somebody told me once that there are only two words in the English language which contain each vowel, once only, in alphabetical order. Anybody know what the other one is?

Indeed, there are more than two words corresponding to those constraints. I then wrote a little Java class which took all the words of a words file (with 100k words) and tested if they matched a regexp corresponding to those constraints.

LOAF is taking the community by storm. I do firmly believe it gonna rock the world. Social software is the way to go : the next revolution. But as far as I know there were no LOAF implementation in Groovy, a promising programming language.

So let’s see how simple it is to write a LOAF implementation using Groovy:

class LOAF {
    static main(args) {
        def loaf = new LOAF()
    }
}

I’m a beginner in Groovy, so use at your own risk. Play with it, it’s free as in beer !