Github and Google recently announced and released the Github archive to BigQuery, liberating a huge dataset of source code in multiple programming languages, and making it easier to query it and discover some insights.

Github explained that the dataset comprises over 3 terabytes of data, for 2.8 million repositories, 145 million commits over 2 billion file paths! The Google Cloud Platform blog gave some additional pointers to give hints about what’s possible to do with the querying capabilities of BigQuery. Also, you can have a look at the getting started guide with the steps to follow to have fun yourself with the dataset.

As I recently joined Google’s developer advocacy team for Google Cloud Platform, I thought I could have a little bit of fun with combining my passion for Apache Groovy with some cool cloudy stuff from Google! Incidentally, Paolo Di Tommaso tweeted about his own experiments with using Groovy with Apache Spark, and shared his code on Github:

I thought that would be a nice fun first little project to try to use Groovy to run a Spark job on Google Cloud Dataproc! Dataproc manages Hadoop & Spark for you: it’s a service that provides managed Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Pig and Apache Hive. You can easily process big datasets at low cost, control those costs by quickly creating managed clusters of any size and turning them off where you’re done. In addition, you can obviously use all the other Google Cloud Platform services and products from Dataproc (ie. store the big datasets in Google Cloud Storage, on HDFS, through BigQuery, etc.)

Direct live from GR8Conf Europe 2016, in Copenhagen, Denmark! This morning, I presented my latest update about the Apache Groovy history, and the latest developments in the 2.4.x and future 2.5 branches.
Abstract:

In dog years… err… Open Source years, the Groovy programming language project is a very mature and successful one, as its 12 million downloads a year can attest. The Groovy language is certainly the most widely deployed alternative language of the JVM today. But how do we go from a hobby night & week-end project to professionally company sponsored? And back again to hobby mode but joining the wider Apache Software Foundation community?

Read more...

Recently, I saw an interesting tweet, mentioning a JavaScript trick using default parameters to make a parameter mandatory.

In a language like Apache Groovy, when statically compiled, you’d get a compilation error if you forgot a parameter, because the signature couldn’t be found by the compiler. In dynamic mode, you’d get a runtime error though, with a MissingMethodException (and the error message should give you a hint as to which method you should actually call instead).

It’s literally the eve of SpringOne2GX, in Washington DC! I’m flying tomorrow, for 9+ hours above the Atlantic, to gather with the cool kids of the Groovy ecosystem. I’m impatient to see some of my fellow readers and Groovy users around there.

And let me wish the Griffon framework and its team a Groovy birthday!

Releases

• Ratpack 1.0-rc-2, a second release candidate
• Gradle 2.7-rc-2 released
• Grails 3.0.5 released with the new Web API profile
• Grails 3.0.6 released
• Spring Boot 1.3.0.M5 released

Articles

• Grails 3 Web profile vs the new Web API profile
• How to deploy a Grails 3 app to AWS Beanstalk and CloudFront CDN by Benoit Hédiard
• MrHaki’s Groovy Goodness
  • Removing elements from a collection
  • Inspect method returns nicely formatted object values
  • Operator overloading in reverse
• MrHaki’s Spocklight
  • Only run specs based on conditions
  • Undo MetaClass changes
• Philip Heath writes about Spock, the logical choice for testing
• Paul Gross’ team has migrated from Gradle to Bazel

Screencasts

• Screencast of NetBeans’ Gradle integration

Interviews

• An interview by JaxEnter of Dierk König in German, where he says that Groovy is a pioneer language where innovative changes help shape the future of Java and other languages

Mailing-list posts

• Griffon celebrates the 7th anniversary of the project!

Tweets

• The Mars rover has a state called “Solar Groovy” noticed Dierk König
• Marco Vermeulen is excited about the upcoming new website for SDKmanager (aka GVM), based off the Groovy website code and look
• Grails 3.0.5 available on GVM
• Grails 3.0.6 available on GVM
• Spring Boot 1.3.0.M5 available in GVM
• Gradle 2.7-rc-2 available through GVM
• Bertrand Goetzman working on a Groovy/Grails training is using a Groovy DSL with Grain to generate dynamic HTML documentation from Markdown documents
• The Gradle plugin for the Grain static site generator is available on the Gradle plugin portal
• Benoit Hédiard created a French-speaking channel in the Grails Slack community
• Roman Shaposhnik is reminded he loves Groovy when looking at how it can make the Apache BigTop project DSL easy to grok
• Matt Sheehan brings our attention to the new auto-generated Groovy DSL documentation for the Jenkins Job DSL

News

• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 36

Jobs

• SmartThings is hiring a cloud engineer with Ratpack experience
• Gilles Laborderie is recruiting for a Grails job in Paris

Books

• MrHaki’s Spocklight notebook updated

Events

• Only a few days left before the end of the Groovy/Grails eXchange call for paper
• Guillaume Laforge is a JavaOne featured speaker
• Guillaume Laforge relaunched the Paris Groovy Grails User Group introducing talks on the Grails 3 novelties and Groovy in a VoIP context

Is it really already September? Time flies so fast in the Groovy ecosystem, and although the northern hemisphere was taking some Summer vacation breaks (at least that’s what I did!) there was quite a bit of interesting content published!

Regarding events, after successful and busy Greach, GR8Conf US/EU conferences, we’re getting ready for September’s SpringOne2GX in Washington! There’s still time to register and join the Groovy ecosystem affictionados! And I’m really eager to seeing you there.

The not-so-weekly Groovy column is back for a summer edition on the shores of the Atlantic ocean (at least, that’s where I am now!) and there was a lot to catch up with in terms of news!

Ratpack is almost at 1.0, only a couple of weeks to go for the mythical release, whereas Gradle arrived in version 2.6, and some updates to the two main Grails lines were out too.

Although on a more irregular schedule, Groovy Weekly continues in the summer with its 74th edition, crossing the bar of the 3000 total news items tracked since it all started!

Some interesting releases for this edition, like the Groovy 2.4.4 release under the Apache umbrella! After a failed attempt, our second try was succesful, and it was particularly important to get it right out the door, as an important security issue uncovered was fixed in this release, and all Groovy users (and frameworks and libraries using Groovy) should upgrade as soon as possible — especially as no older version will be released with the patch.

It’s definitely not Tuesday, but nonetheless, lots of accumulated great and Groovy content to share with you all! It’s not easy to keep up the pace, sorry for the irregular timing of this column — I might have to remove the “Weekly” part of the name! But you won’t regret this edition, packed with so much content!

Already one month gone by since GR8Conf Europe 2015, but we have content to share about the event! And GR8Conf US 2015 is happening soon too! We also have presentations and videos from Gradle Summit and Greach 2015.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure to speak about Groovy on Android at the Paris Android User Group. This is an evolution of my presentation from the DroidCon 2014 conference, with a few updates, in particular more coverage of SwissKnife.