The Groovy development team and SpringSource are very pleased to announce the final release of Groovy 1.7, the most popular and successful dynamic language for the JVM! After two betas and two release candidates, we're are happy to deliver this new and very important milestone to our ever growing user base.

Over the years, the Groovy project has managed to grow a community, but not only that, a very rich and active ecosystem of Groovy-related projects: the Grails web stack, the Griffon swing application framework, the Gant and Gradle build solutions, the Gaelyk lightweight toolkit for Google App Engine, the Gpars parallel system, the Easyb and Spock testing frameworks and the GMock mocking library, the CodeNarc and GMetrics quality tools, and many more! With all these initiatives, the world is even groovier and we're thankful these projects have helped us shape what Groovy is today.

Groovy 1.7 provides the following new major features and enhancements:

• Anonymous Inner Classes and Nested Classes, for more Java-friendliness
• Annotation enhancements, with the ability to put annotations on imports, packages and variable declarations)
• Grape enhancement (the Groovy module system)
• Power Asserts, for more readable and expressive assertions
• AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) enhancements with the AST Viewer and AST Builder, for easing the creation of AST transformations
• Various dependency upgrades (including the ASM bytecode library to get ready for the JSR-292 InvokeDynamic bytecode instructions)
• A rewrite of the GroovyScriptEngine for more flexibility and rapidity
• Several GroovyConsole enhancements, like line numbers, a new output view, and more
• Various SQL improvements, like batch updates and transaction support
• and many more enhancements!

You can learn more about all these features in the Groovy 1.7 release notes.

For further details, you can have a look at our JIRA release notes for some more details.

You can download Groovy in the download section of our website.

The Groovy development team would particularly thank all the users, contributors and committers who helped us all along to improve the quality and usefulness of the language and its APIs, as well as all those projects in the Groovy ecosystem who influenced us and inspired us.

We're offering our community this new release as a Christmas present, hoping you'll enjoy it as much as we did when working on it, and we wish you all a very Groovy Christmas, and all the best for the coming year!
Enjoy this new release, and stay tuned for all the upcoming improvements we'll bring you in the future: a more modular and even faster Groovy, additional abilities for more readable and expressive DSLs, and many more exciting features!

Big release days!

• Yesterday, Grails 1.1.2 was pulled from the oven, while waiting for Spring 3 to be available to release 1.2.
• Today, we released Groovy 1.6.6 and 1.7-RC-1, bringing use closer to the final 1.7 release, which would take place before Christmas.
• And tonight, I've also updated Gaelyk 0.3.2, the lightweight Groovy toolkit for developing applications on Google App Engine. In particular, have a look at the URL routing support and the few bug fixes and also at my presentation at the Devoxx conference.

Have fun and enjoy those releases!

I'm back from Devoxx, where I had a very pleasant stay, nice discussions with many attendees and speakers, and it's always a great opportunity to meet friends you haven't seen in a while! And this time, I was there with my friend Patrick Chanezon from Google, to speak about Google App Engine, Groovy and Gaelyk. I've uploaded our slides on Slideshare, and you can view them embedded here on this blog:

A bit before the presentation, I also fixed a little but annoying bug with the XMPP support in Gaelyk, bumping the version number to 0.3.1, so if you're using 0.3 already, and need incoming XMPP messaging support, please upgrade to 0.3.1.

The presentation at Devoxx seems to have been pretty well received and attended (I think we reached about 800 geeks in the audience, my new personal record) and people seemed to have appreciated the talk and content, as well as my final Gaelyk demo, interacting with the app through XMPP. This was quite a lot of fun, and just a few hours of work at night to get the demo ready.

Update: I've pushed a zip file of the demo I've run online, in case you wanna have a look at that code sample.

Following the conference-driven development principle, right in time for the Devoxx conference and my session with my friend Patrick Chanezon on Google App Engine Java and Gaelyk/Groovy, I've just released a new version (0.3) of the Gaelyk lightweight Groovy toolkit for Google App Engine.

This new version fixes a bug, adds some new capabilities, and bring a small change:

• The Google services bound to the Groovlets and templates through the binding have been renamed (except userService) to remove the service suffix
• There are some new methods for working with the memcache service, so you can use the map notation (subscript) to access elements of the cache, as well as using the 'in' keyword to check whether a key is present in the cache.
• Since GAE SDK 1.2.6, incoming email support has been added, so Gaelyk 0.3 also adds support for incoming emails.
• There was an issue since the birth of Gaelyk with sending emails, it has now been fixed.

Please make sure to check the tutorial, as it's been updated with new sections on these changes and new features.

You can download the latest JAR and the latest template project directly from GitHub.

The Gaelyk website uses that new version of Gaelyk, as well as the latest 1.2.6 SDK for Google App Engine -- The Groovy Web Console has not yet to been updated.

Please let me also thank some of the contributors to this release, such as Sean Gilligan, Kazuchika Sekiya, Jinto, for their help with improving the tutorial, and to all those who contributed on the mailing-list or elsewhere. For instance, well done to the Averone company for migrating its website to Gaelyk, or the the Phone4Water website also on Gaelyk!

Gaelyk is a lightweight toolkit for developing and deploying applications on Google App Engine.

As Google recently released an updated version of their Google App Engine SDK, providing support for XMPP/Jabber messaging and Task Queues, I've worked on a new Gaelyk version providing support for these new features, with a Groovy touch.

Gaelyk can be downloaded here: http://gaelyk.appspot.com/download/

You can have a look at the latest tutorial updated with coverage of:

• sending / receiving XMPP/Jabber messages,
• using Task Queues,
• also an example of how to do queries on the datastore has been added. Read the tutorial here: http://gaelyk.appspot.com/tutorial/

The Gaelyk website uses that new version of Gaelyk, as well as the latest 1.2.5 SDK for Google App Engine. The Groovy Web Console will also be updated shortly to use that new version.

Have fun with Gaelyk!

Time flies, soooo fast! Griffon, the Groovy MVC framework for building desktop applications, is already one year old. Developers know Groovy and Grails very well, but there are many other Groovy-based tools and frameworks, and Griffon is a very nice and successful animal of the Groovy ecosystem.

Others are already celebrating this first anniversary on twitter, as well as in the blogosphere, like some of the Griffon developers:

• Jim Shingler
• James Williams
• Andres Almiray
• Josh Reed
• Danno Ferrin

With tons of plugins, books in the writing, Griffon is really gaining a lot of momentum and mindshare!

Happy Birtday! Long live the Griffon!

Warning: Sorry for my English-speaking readership, but once in a while, I'm writing in French! Don't unsubscribe, I won't write too often in French ;-) I guess I should probably create a dedicated feed for that though... anyway... put your French glasses on!

Juste un petit mot pour vous dire qu'il nous reste encore quelques places pour la formation Groovy / Grails que j'animerai à Paris le mois prochain. Elle aura lieu du 21 au 23 juillet, dans les locaux de nos amis de chez Zénika.

N'hésitez pas à vous inscrire, c'est par ici.

En parlant de Zénika, jeudi soir, ils organisent une présentation sur Gradle, faite par Hans Dokter lui-même (le créateur de Gradle). Pour ceux intéressés par les problématiques de build, fleurtant avec les problématiques et limitations de Ant et/ou Maven, cette approche standardisée du build scripté par Groovy est vraiment très intéressante. Je crois qu'il reste encore quelques places, dépéchez-vous, moi je me suis déjà inscrit ! Il y a également une formation d'une journée, le lendemain, pour ceux qui veulent aller plus loin.

Une fois n'est pas coutume, je bloguerai en français dans cette catégorie tech, pour vous annoncer la sortie du podcast des Cast Codeurs !

Les Cast Codeurs, c'est un podcast en français dans le code sur Java par Emmanuel Bernard (JBoss / Hibernate), Guillaume Laforge (SpringSource / Groovy), Antonio Goncalves (freelance / Paris JUG lead) et Vincent Massol (XWiki / Maven).

Restez informés sur les sujets brûlants de l'industrie Java. Plongez sur un sujet précis avec l'interview de l'éposiode. Supportez les radotages de vos hôtes.

Ecoutez-nous et faites passer le message au tour de vous ! Le JavaPosse n'a qu'à  bien se tenir (ou alors faut qu'ils se mettent à  parler français !!!)

• Web : http://lescastcodeurs.com/
• iTunes : http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=312239675
• Podcast syndication : http://lescastcodeurs.com/podcast-rss
• Blog feed : http://lescastcodeurs.com/feed/
• Vos commentaires : commentaire@lescastcodeurs.com

The news has already spread all around, even on our mailing-lists, but let me echo it again here:

Groovy is now supported in the newly released Google App Engine Java platform!

My friend Didier Girard beats me to it and had already blogged about the support of both Java and Groovy (in French). He was quicker than me... or at least woke up earlier than me ;-)

SpringSource's worked with Google to ensure that Groovy would run well on their platform. Big thanks to the work of Jochen Theodorou, Matt Taylor and myself, for making this possible!

We released Groovy 1.6.1, with key fixes, for that purpose, yesterday, in time for the big news!

If you want to have a go at it, be quick, as they will only allow 10000 developers to access AppEngine Java initially.

I've written a tutorial for your first steps for Groovy on AppEngine.

I've also written a small Google Maps / Geocoding service / Flickr demo in 90 lines of Groovy code.

Enjoy!

I'm pleased to announce here the organization of a European conference dedicated to Groovy, Grails and Griffon:

GR8 Conference — Copenhagen — May 2009

The GR8 Conference is an affordable two-day conference taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark, on May 18th and 19th 2009, organized by Javagruppen (Danish JUG) and SpringSource, dedicated to the Groovy dynamic language, the Grails web framework, the Griffon Swing framework, and other great technologies — hence the pun and code name GR8.

Speakers and audience

All the sessions and labs of the agenda will be presented by experts in the field and makers of those technologies, and will give you — developers, tech leads and architects — a practical and hands-on experience on all topics covered.

Registration

If you register before April 1st, you'll benefit from our Early Bird rate, whereas after that date, the regular price will apply. So be sure to register in advance, both for the affordable price and because the seats are limited!

Our mission statement

Our goals organizing the conference are the following:

• Spread the word on those great technologies
• Help you learn how to best leverage and integrate those technologies
• Get up-to-speed quickly for developing your next project
• Make you come back to work proficient and productive with Groovy, Grails and Griffon

Why you should attend

Here are several reasons why you should attend this conference, beyond just learning more about Groovy, Grails and Griffon:

• Learn directly from the experts
• Get up-to-speed rapidly on Groovy, Grails and Griffon
• Meet other enthusiasts and share your experiences with them
• Foster a community around those technologies
• Sharpen your skills in a down economy to get ready when the tables are turning back

The benefits

Beyond learning more about Groovy, Grails and Griffon, all attendees will bring back home:

• a 90-day evaluation license for IntelliJ IDEA, the best IDE for developing with Groovy, Grails and Griffon
• a chance to win a free SpringSource training on Groovy & Grails, and a discount if you decide to follow one of those training courses
• coupons for discounts on major Groovy and Grails books
• a special edition of GroovyMag, the Groovy/Grails/Griffon developer magazine
• all code samples of the conference on a USB key
• a brochure on deploying Grails applications in the cloud, on the Morph AppSpace cloud computing platform
• access to all the video recordings of the sessions on Parleys.com after the conference

We're looking forward to meeting you at the conference.

The GR8 Conference organizers.