I think it’s safe to say summer is in full swing now (or winter’s in full swing, depending on your hemisphere).  I just got back from a short road trip which included long stretches of too much AC, finding new radio stations, and dropped cell calls.  During that trip I attended this year’s CodeStock in Knoxville, Tennessee.  While CodeStock is largely a Microsoft-oriented event, I bumped in to more than a few people who were familiar with Groovy or were already using it on projects.  This was certainly great to hear!

This month’s line up has something for almost everyone.  Kirsten Schwark continues her monthly “Under the Hood” series with a first look at the typing system in Groovy.  Understanding this can help you decide when it makes sense to statically type in Groovy, and when it makes sense to leave the typing out of your code.

Dave Klein brings us the latest news, and also covers the newly released Jabber plugin in this month’s Plugin Corner.  Dave’s also got a new “Grails Primer” book coming out from Pragmatic Programmers soon.  The beta book is out now at http://pragprog.com/titles/dkgrails/grails – check it out and give Dave some feedback on that if you haven’t already.

We’ve got some pieces from authors who are new to the GroovyMag writing team this month – Dean Del Ponte and Jorge Lugo.  Jorge’s contribution delves in to the GParallelizer framework, helping you write parallelized apps with ease.  GParallelizer and Groovy make for a powerful combination, and Jorge will have you up to speed in no time.

Dean Del Ponte takes us through writing an inline editor for your Grails data tables.  By building on top of the existing jQuery library, Dean’s article demonstrates just what’s involved in adding this powerful UI feature to your next project.

Lastly, this month sees Robert Fischer bringing us a piece on how to use the logging functionality of Grails.  His article stemmed from some discussions we had about the fact that many areas of the Grails documentation assumes a familiarity with existing Java components.  With logging, there’s an assumption that a developer is familiar with Log4J, or can take the existing Log4J documentation and adapt it to a current Grails project.  Some developers, like me, are coming at Grails from a non-Java background, and rather than answering my questions for the next three months on IM, Robert decided to address the basics of Grails logging in this month’s piece.  Whether you’re new to Grails logging or not, I think you’ll still get some useful information from his piece.

Shawn Hartsock’s “Grails in a J2EE World” series will continue in our August issue.

This month’s cover photo comes from Steve Dalton.  If you’re interested in seeing your photograph on the cover of GroovyMag, submit your photo to flickr.com and tag it “groovymag” or just email to editor@groovymag.com.  We’ll choose a winner each month, and the winner will receive a gift certificate to Amazon.com.

As always, your feedback or ideas for GroovyMag are welcomed at editor@groovymag.com, or if you’re feeling adventurous, by phone at 919-827-4724.

Michael Kimsal