This week, an InfoWorld article lists Groovy among the 9 cutting-edge programming language worth learning today, although it reduces Groovy to a mere Java dynamic scripting language. Are you happy with the investment you made into learning Groovy a while ago?

We also have some nice releases, like the monthly Ratpack release, or the 1.0 versions of GroovyServ (for starting up your Groovy scripts at light speed), and Gaiden for making nice documentation with Markdown.

Isn’t it a mythical number? The 42nd edition of Groovy Weekly! Will we get the answer to life the universe and everything?

At least, we have a nice list of releases, this week, in particular with Grails 2.4.4, Geb 0.10 and the first milestone of Reactor 2.0!

And if there’s one thing I’d like to highlight in addition, that would be MrHaki’s release of his new book, the Spock Notebook, with all those nice recipes about our preferred testing framework.

Along with some valuable releases like the first release candidate of Gradle 2.2, there are interesting links on the topic of the Groovy Android story, as well as new glimpse on AST macros and AST pattern matching coming up. Worth a look!

In terms of events, the Greach conference in Spain has opened its Call for Paper, and the GR8Conf Europe crew reminds us that all the great content from the last edition is freely available on their YouTube channel.

No big highlight this week, but still plenty to learn from!

We have some minor releases, interesting articles on Spock, on how to leverage traits with Geb, some thoughts on reactive programming, new demos and tutorials for GrooScript.

And we can wish a happy birthday to the GR8 Ladies!

Releases

• Spring Tool Suite & Groovy Grails Tool Suite 3.6.2 released
• GrooScript 0.6.1 released
• GridGain 0.6.2 with better support of themes that use plain CSS and better handling of large files
• Spring Boot 1.1.8 released
• Spring Boot 1.2.0.M2 released
• Gretty 1.1.4 released
• Alain Stalder released an extensive manual for his Grengine, his alternative approach to integrating Groovy in your applications

Articles

• MrHaki’s Spocklight: indicate class under test with @Subject annotation
• MrHaki’s Groovy Goodness: Closure as a Class
• Kyle Boon is leveraging Groovy traits with Geb
• Luke Daley explains executional flexibility through reactive programming
• A follow-up post from Andrés Almiray on the new desktop application framework JSR
• Savant, a new Groovy-powered build tool?

Presentations

• Groovy introduction slides by the GR8 Ladies
• Colin Harrington on web security

News

• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 41

Interview

• Interview of Hans Dockter on Gradle and continuous delivery

Tweets

• Groovy makes Android code much more concise
• The GR8 Ladies celebrate their first birthday!
• Joe Wolf notes that Groovy reached 10,000 questions on Stack Overflow
• Eugene Kamenev is investigating bring GORM-like features for Groovy on Android<, to deal with building UI, handling validation, and more
• Youri Ackx liked Guillaume Laforge’s funny slide from his JavaOne presentation about how to represent map / reduce, sandwich-style
• Ratpack adds more Promise operations and improved the documentation
• Dierk König says the builder pattern in Groovy is a great example of the state monad
• Graeme Rocher waves goodbye to the old Grails build system
• Gradle features a handful of plugins for JavaScript / front-end build automation
• One could wish all front end development be done with Groovy and GrooScript?
• Spring Boot 1.1.8 available through GVM
• Spring Boot 1.2.0.M2 available through GVM

Code snippets

• GrooScript for client-side templating with the HTML builder or with Groovy templates

Events

• Baruch Sadogursky will be speaking about AST transformations at JavaDay Kiev and will wow the crowds with Groovy Puzzlers at JavaDay Kiev and Jokerconf!
• Iván López will be talking about “Metaprogramming with Groovy” at GeeCON Prague next 23rd October
• The Greach conference is being prepared and is taking shape, and the organizers are looking for sponsors
• GR8Conf Europe 2015 is in the works, as the team reunites

After some trouble getting to San Francisco because of strikes, transportation issues, burnt control tower, and more… I managed to land to JavaOne! I missed my own first talk and I was glad and grateful that Cédric could present it for me.

At JavaOne, the Groovy project received the award from ZeroTurnaround / RebelLabs, for the “Best Tech - Geek Choice Award” :

Youpi mon projet a reçu un prix de l’innovation ! Très fier de ce que mon équipe a accompli !

Read more...

I was very honored to be able to speak about Groovy at DroidCon Paris 2014 a couple of weeks ago. It was really great to spend time with the Android community and learn more about their needs, pain points, and more.

The video of the presentation is available below:

And you can find the slides here too:

Back from JavaOne, where the Groovy project received its “Best Tech - Geek Choice Awards” from ZeroTurnaround, and where it win the Script Bowl competion this year again!

Releases

• Griffon 2.0.0 final released!
• Ratpack 0.9.9 is out moving to Java 8 as a base requirement
• Alain Stalder releases Grengine, another approach to running and embedding Groovy
• RxGroovy 1.0.0-RC-1 was released with a new artifact ID

Articles

• Marcin Zajączkowski comes back with Part 2 of what’s coming up in Spock 1.0
• Andrés Almiray explains it’s time for a desktop application framework JSR
• Trisha Gee is using Groovy to insert XML into MongoDB
• Hans Dockter published the Gradleware July-September newsletter
• André Steingreß writes about principals tracking in Grails
• Part 8 of the series “I don’t like Hibernate / Grails”
• A Spock quick tip for Grails integration tests from André Steingreß
• Quick Gradle tip: setting Bintray attributes for Gradle plugins
• Tomás Lin on Spring Boot and Webjars: overwriting configuration during runtime
• Burt Beckwith answers a Stack Overflow question on overriding Grails’ default create-app files

Presentations

• Ixchel Ruiz and Andrés Almiray demonstrated the funky-ness of Groovy at JavaOne 2014
• Cédric Champeau presented “rethinking API design with traits in Groovy” at JavaOne 2014
• Guillaume Laforge posted his JavaOne 2014 slides about “Groovy in the light of Java 8”
• Guillaume Laforge published his slides about “Groovy in 2014 and beyond” from JavaOne 2014
• Guillaume Laforge presented Groovy on Android at DroidCon Paris 2014

News

• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 39
• Jacob Aae Mikkelsen’s Grails Diary week 40

Tweets

• Groovy reaches first place on the podium, along with Clojure, beating JRuby and Scala at JavaOne 2014’s Script Bowl competition
• Groovy received its Best Tech Geek Choice Award from ZeroTurnaround at JavaOne 2014
• Cédric Champeau is looking into integrating Sergei Egorov’s Groovy macros into Groovy 2.4
• Dierk König says the finish line is in sight for Groovy in Action, second edition
• If you use dependency classifiers (like Groovy’s “indy”) in Gradle builds with IntelliJ IDEA, you might want to vote for this issue as it’s broken in Intellij IDEA
• If you like SASS and Gradle, Danny Hyun notes there’s a plugin for that
• Russel Hart notes that as of Ratpack 0.9.9 you can stream your Hystrix metrics out to the Hystrix dashboard or Turbine
• Russel Hart remarks that Ratpack’s GroovyChainAction is replaced with Action<Chain> and the Groovy.chain() call in Ratpack 0.9.9
• Craig Burke is readying his Angular.JS Grails Lazybones template

Code snippets

• Ken Sipe’s code samples from his JavaOne 2014 Spock presentation
• More GrooScript demos available
• Ratpack promises, a comparison between Java 7 and 8

Events

• Mac Liaw will be speaking about Ratpack at 1 Dev Day Detroit
• Andrés Almiray is presenting Gradle, harder, better, stronger, faster, at Jazoon

Books

• Jon Kerridge publishes two ebooks on concurrency and parallelism and makes good use of Groovy

Here’s a short column this week, a bit in advance, as I’m flying to JavaOne tomorrow to spread the Groovy truth!

Releases

• Cédric Champeau announced the release of Groovy 2.3.7
• Spring Boot 1.1.7 released

Articles

• MrHaki’s Gradle Goodness: running Groovy scripts as application
• The reason the internet was invented or cat pictures for the win, by Ken Kousen, sprinkled with bits of Groovy JSON and Swing code
• Exporting Grails’ i18n messages into Javascript
• Andrés Almiray’s Gradle Glam on features that would benefit the Gradle community
• Jorge Martin on the inception and the Groovy Swiss Knife library for Android and the problems encountered with Android Studio’s Groovy support

Presentations

• Guillaume Laforge presented on Groovy on Android at DroidCon Paris 2014

Tweets

• Robert Fletcher noticed IntelliJ IDEA’s clever capability of properly renaming closures it parameter
• Java’s Duke is looking pretty Groovy at JavaOne!
• Groovy 2.3.7 is available on GVM
• A pretty Groovy book!
• Jon DeJong makes Groovy strongly typed by hitting the keys harder when coding!
• New component selection and replacement rules for upcoming Gradle 2.2
• Robert Guerra shows a screenshot of deployment of Ratpack with Java 8 on Heroku

Code snippets

• Cédric Champeau shows a fun snippet of code using metaprogramming to let Groovy be pretty tolerant to typos in method names

SpringOne2GX 2014 in Dallas is over. And next week starts JavaOne. It’s conference season! Speaking of which… the fine GR8Conf US crew released many more presentations this week! There’s a lot of content to go through!

Releases

• GrooScript 0.6 is out, on the road to 1.0, and Jorge Franco is looking for your feedback
• Gradle Android plugin 0.13 works with Gradle 2.1
• JBake 2.3.2 with Asciidoctor 1.5

News

• Incremental Java compilation landed in Gradle 2.1
• Grails Diary week 38 by Jacob Aae Mikkelsen

Articles

• What’s new in Spock 1.0, by Marcin Zajączkowski
• GPars remote dataflows and actors by Mario García
• Writing React.JS components in Groovy with GrooScript
• The “Grails revolution” movement is looking forward to spreading the word on how great Grails is
• What’s new with Gradle Vaadin Plugin 0.9? Groovy support!
• MrHaki’s Gradle Goodness: Adding dependencies only for packaging to war
• Multi-project code coverage using Gradle and JaCoCo by Clemens Siebler
• After his Hibernate/Grails series, Robert Peszek comes to functional programming: “My dream: software without any bugs … and is Groovy functional? How about Grails?”
• How to speed up Gradle builds? Use the daemon!

Presentations

• Guillaume Laforge presented about Groovy’s Android support at DroidCon Paris 2014
• Idiomatic Spock with Robert Fletcher recorded at Netflix
• Trisha Gee gave her Groovy / Angular.JS / HTML 5 / MongoDB talk to the Virtual JUG
• Micro-services with Groovy and Spring Boot by Marcin Grzejszczak
• GR8Conf US 2014 presentations
  • Groovy at SmartThings presented by Scott Vlaminck and Ryan Applegate
  • The Groovy Ecosystem revisited by Andrés Almiray
  • Getting started with Ratpack presented by Jeff Beck
  • Realtime Ratpack by Robert Fletcher
  • Introduction to Gradle by John Engelman
  • Grails Goodness presented by Hubert Klein Ikkink
  • Gradle Goodness presented by Hubert Klein Ikkink
  • Distributed platform development with Groovy by Robert Fletcher
  • Introduction to multithreaded programing with GPars by Jon DeJong
  • Tour de plugin, by Søren Berg Glasius
  • Grails Worst Practices by Burt Beckwith
  • Griffon, what’s new and what’s coming, by Andrés Almiray
  • How to test your Grails application presented by Colin Harrington
  • Hybrid view rendering with Grails by Robert Fletcher
  • Testing BitCoin and MasterCoin with Spock by Sean Gilligan
  • Performance tuning Grails applications by Lari Hotari
  • What’s new in the Grails Spring security plugin by Burt Beckwith
  • Application architectures in Grails by Peter Ledbrook
  • Idiomatic Spock by Robert Fletcher
  • Getting Grails into the Enterprise by Ryan Vanderwerf
  • Metaprogramming with the Groovy Runtime by Jeff Brown
  • Getting Groovy with Graphs by Stefan Armbruster
  • Serving Websockets to iOS, Android and the Web using Groovy, Spring, Angular.js, SockJs and STOMP presented by Sean Gilligan

Screencasts

• Bertrand Goetzmann publishes a screen cast of Grails with the Ionic framework demonstrating a REST API example

Tweets

• Peter Niederwieser is lobbying for fixing those issues in the IntelliJ IDEA Groovy support. Please vote for them!
• Ratpack 0.9.9 onward will require Java 8
• Ratpack ships new releases every first day of the month
• Ratpack’s RxJava support in Java 7 vs Java 8
• You can decorate your garden with Groovy flowers!
• Proper overloaded setter support is coming to Groovy
• Groovy as a gateway drug into the JVM
• With OpenJDK 8 out, Ratpack’s next release will require Java 8
• Benoît Hédiart mentions CodingGame.com: a coding game where you can program games in Groovy
• Guillaume Laforge is having fun coding an Android application in Groovy for helping her daughter to learn how to read
• Guillaume Laforge on stage at DroidCon Paris 2014 evangelizing Groovy on Android
• GroovyBlogs now displays latest blog entries and most popular ones

Code snippets

• How to create multiple Android dex files with a Gradle trick

The SpringOne2GX 2014 conference is over, but you can see below more tweets and presentations from the second part of the conference, and the videos will be available later on on InfoQ.

Apart from the excitement around Grails 3, Spring Boot, Groovy, and more, I’d like to highlight the very interesting feedback from Scott Hickey who comes back on 6 years of production usage of Groovy at Mutual of Omaha, saying “Groovy is a phenomenal language for businnes applications”, and that there’s nothing “better” on the JVM! See the first couple of tweets in the Twitter section.