Interviews for all my Groovy friends!
For Groovy and Grails project committers, February (and the whole of 2013 in general) seems to be a bit of what they might perhaps call “busy,” as months (and years) go. In the past couple of weeks, interviewers and conference organizers have been publishing most fascinating reports on the progress of Groovy the language and Grails the framework, with important recent releases just behind us and exciting new ones coming up. From our friends at InfoQ, we have:
Guillaume Laforge on Groovy 2.1
We officially noted the first beta of Groovy 2.1 earlier this month — it was released in the dark ages of December last year, and we had been told to expect the final 2.1 by perhaps as soon as the end of January. Lo and behold, it is now here, and this last week Victor Grazi for InfoQ spoke with Guillaume Laforge on some of the newly-available features we’ve been eagerly awaiting from this release, such as GPars and support for invokedynamic from Java 7. There’s some good stuff on the mindset that the Groovy committers employ in deciding what will be included and in what fashion in newer releases of Groovy, and even some bonus sneak peeking into the direction in which the Groovy of the future will be heading in the months and years, yea, the decades to come.
Jeff Brown on Grails 2
Dio Synodinos interviewed Grails committer and generally legendary Groovyist Jeff Brown at QCon last year, mostly on Grails 2 but also some on the current state and popular applications of Groovy. They’ve just put up the video of this interview, and there’s even a transcript (which if somewhat hard to get to is at least nice for those who for whatever reason prefer to read rather than watch). I would recommend this very much even if only for the discussion on Groovy itself, but obviously as Mr. Brown is an exceedingly smart fellow and just recently co-authored The Definitive Guide To Grails 2 with Grails creator Graeme Rocher, the entire thing is worth watching (or perchance reading).
And from other Groovy sectors of the universe, we have the following:
Graeme Rocher on “The Road To Grails 3.0”
Greach, “the Groovy Spanish conf,” just happened last month in Madrid, and its wise organizers have put up video of some of the sessions there. This includes Graeme Rocher’s on the upcoming features of Grails 2.3, which we should be seeing in the near future — the official roadmap suggests a release in Q2 this year — and on 3.0, which we should also be seeing sometime in this very to-be-groovy year of 2013. This is of course nicely recent, and who better to expound upon the future of Grails than the project lead? Have see.
Manning’s Gradle In Action now in Early Access edition
Any of our reading audience that are familiar with the popular Groovy build tool Gradle are no doubt also familiar with Benjamin Muschko, one of the Gradle community’s more actively active members. He is now in the midst of writing a book on Gradle for Manning’s In Action series; it is scheduled to come out in paperback form this fall, and this paperback can be preordered, but in the meantime, those of our readers that favor electronic devices for the use of reading can get Gradle In Action in ebook form now through Manning’s Early Access Program. If you do so, you get to not only make use of the book in its early pre-release form but also to provide Mr. Muschko with helpful feedback as he is writing the book — he of course gets to incorporate this feedback into what will be the final version of the book.
A groovy effort to update documentation — and a site redesign
“Groovy is a very mature and widely used language on the Java platform, with hundred thousands of developers worldwide. However, one area where the Groovy project can do better is with its documentation.… We’re launching an effort towards overhauling our documentation and web presence.” Thus begins Guillaume Laforge’s February 8 message to the Groovy user list, announcing a community-wide effort to improve and better present Groovy’s documentation and website. The official Groovy team members are going to be the ones moving this forward for the most part, of course, but they are looking for feedback (this is where the “community” part comes in) and suggestions on how and where to work at Groovy’s online presentation. Those of you with ideas here should not fail to get involved.
“The Groovy Conundrum”
The editorial opinion recently published at DrDobbs.com on the curious current position of Groovy in the larger JVM language space seems to have been a motivating consideration for the Groovy team in this aforementioned plan of revamping. In summary, Andrew Binstock says: “Groovy is one of the most interesting JVM languages, but its longtime performance issues kept it confined to narrow niches. However, a series of important upgrades look like they might push the language into the mainstream. There’s the conundrum.” You may wish to read the full article.
Wanted: a Massachusetts Groovy developer to help change the world
Vsnap, the Boston-based startup which we have mentioned in the past as building its video messaging service on the Grails framework, is looking for a Java or Groovy developer in Massachusetts (Grails experience is a plus for the position). If you yourself are currently looking for Grails work in Massachusetts or know of somebody else who is, do be sure to check this out — see their blog post for full details.
