Groovy 1.8.2 And 1.9-Beta-3 Are In The Wild
Guillaume Laforge and the Groovy development team have announced new releases in both of the Groovy branches: 1.8.2 in 1.8 and the third beta of 1.9 (which due to an accidental early release had to be renamed from “beta 2”). These are both chiefly bug-fixing releases, but, as Guillaume points out, they also include “the completion of the primitive type arithmetics performance optimizations.” (This has a somewhat targeted audience: “Microbenchmarks affictionados should be happy.”) You can see the release notes at the CodeHaus, but you are going to download it anyway, so…
Groovy++ 0.9.0 released
Also in Groovy language releases: Alex Tkachman has announced Groovy++’s 0.9.0 release. They are expecting to have 1.0 out before October 4. (This release has been tested with Groovy core v. 1.8.2.)
And speaking (or typing) of Groovy++: Here is a set of benchmarks (Groovy++ vs. Java) which was recently brought to my attention.
Grails 2.0: a second milestone release
The Grails development team has released the second milestone of Grails 2.0. This is worthy of some excitement: if you follow that link (or even if you do not, seeing that I am here telling you about it), you may notice that this is the last milestone release of Grails 2.0. The next release will begin the round of RCs, and the Grails developers expect to have the final 2.0 release out in mid-October. You may wish to see the “What’s New” section of the docs again; it has been updated for this milestone.
A New Skin For The Groovy Website
Have you visited groovy.codehaus.org recently? (I jest. Of course you have not.) Guillaume Laforge, in response to the plea of millions of developers a discussion on usability and user experience as it relates to language adoption 
, has put together a (temporary) (very fine-looking) new design for Groovy’s website. The Groovy team is already working with a web designer for a better and more lasting design, as well as improving Groovy’s documentation. See Guillaume’s blog post for details on how it was done (and a disclaimer).
Griffon Reaches 3rd Year
Andres Almiray has put up a birthday post for Griffon, the Groovy RIA framework, which was started three years ago this week (or rather last week). The Griffon team is working on “two big overhauls” to the framework; for now, he describes several highly interesting features available in the current release.
Optimising Your Application With Grails Resources Plugin
Marc Palmer has posted a highly detailed article describing the use of his Resources plugin for Grails (which will be built into Grails by 2.0).
Groovy, Fastest Growing Language According To eWeek
This was spotted by Guillaume Laforge: eWeek’s new article on programming language trends tells us that “…in the time frame this slide show depicts, Groovy saw the largest increase in jobs” (this begins in November 2009).
