Functional Thinking
Neal Ford emphasizes the fact that functional programming uses a different way of solving a problem, thinking about the results rather than the steps to make.
Neal Ford emphasizes the fact that functional programming uses a different way of solving a problem, thinking about the results rather than the steps to make.
The Grails development team at SpringSource, a division of VMWare, recently announced the release of Grails 2.0. This release improves Grails usability akin to Roo console support. GORM, the persistence layers in Grails, maximises the DSL support from the Groovy 1.8 via AST transformations.
Performance and productivity improvements have gone into recent editions of Groovy and more are on tap. InfoQ caught up with Guillaume Laforge to discuss how AST improve developer productivity, built-in JSON support, domain specific language support improvements, optimizations, and Groovy's roadmap for 1.9, 2.0, including Java 7 language support and Groovy adoption rates.

David Pollak, famous Scala advocate, blog posted, "Yes, Virginia, Scala is hard", causing a brouhaha. Scala use is increasing, yet the post claims that Scala tries to do too much, has poor IDE support, and more. InfoQ catches up with David Pollak and Dick Wall to comment on the complaints in the post, as well as the future of Scala. David has things to say about Groovy, Ceylon and Lambdas too.

In this article, David Dossot, co-author of Mule in Action, examines the power of Mule RESTpack and Groovy in orchestrating RESTful services in the Mule messaging platform. The article detail the interactions for each of these steps and will consider what particular Mule moving parts and Groovy features we have used to achieve such an interaction.
Andy Clement and Martin Lippert discuss the latest developments in Spring Tool Suite related to Java 7, Spring 3.1, Groovy, Grails, Gradle, and Cloud Foundry.
Guillaume Laforge covers the main new features in Groovy 1.8 –DSL with command chain expressions, runtime performance improvements, GPars, closure support, JSON, and what is to come in Groovy 1.9.
Venkat Subramaniam talks about the characteristics of JVM languages like Groovy, JRuby and Scala, and their applicability in enterprise applications. He also mentions several implementation details and finishes by addressing issues of lifelong learning for developers.
Paul King discusses the state of Groovy and its maturing ecosystem which includes IDE support, static analysis tools, testing frameworks and the GPars library for concurrency.

"Getting Started with Grails" brings you up to speed on this modern web framework. Companies as varied as LinkedIn, Wired, and Taco Bell are all using Grails. Are you ready to get started as well?

Grails is an open-source, rapid web application development framework that provides a super-productive full-stack programming model based on the Groovy scripting language and built on top of Spring, Hibernate, and other standard Java frameworks. Over the course of this book, the reader will explore the various aspects of Grails and also experience Grails by building a Grails app.