Groovy released its jsr-6 version last week, the final release before the much anticipated first release candidate. Noteworthy in the release inludes patches submitted by Oracle around Groovy's easy support of JMX beans (eg: listing operations with an added method is a new feature), and also a new solution for mocking (based on Groovy's Meta-Object Protocol), which has not been documented yet except in the upcoming "Groovy in Action" book. Stored procedure support in groovy.sql.SQL, a simpler class loading scheme, and the rest is mostly bug fixes. InfoQ had a quick chat with Groovy lead Guillaume Laforge. When the Groovy JSR-5 release was made in February, it was announced that the release candidate was next. On the reasons for the change, Guillaume replied:
I decided to create a new jsr-x release because getting to RC-1 was taking time: we're redesigning the core of Groovy: its Meta-Object Protocol. And it's really taking longer than expected, because it's a very complicated and tricky job. But fortunately, with this new underlying infrastructure, Groovy should really become much more efficient and have a performance much closer to raw Java.On the timeline towards 1.0 final and what needs to be done:
So instead of waiting too much for a new milestone, and as we tend to like the "release early, release often" mantra, it made sens to release a milestone before RC-1. RC-1 will include the new MOP. As this milestone didn't include it, we didn't want to call it RC-x.
RC-1 will contain the new MOP. That's one of the most important redesign of the internals of Groovy. In the end, it won't really change anything for the end-users, except gaining more performance and less method dispatch issues with tricky Java/Groovy integration corner cases. I hope we'll release 1.0 no later than in three months. That's a hope, not a promise ;-)Guillaume Laforge two weeks ago took over as spec lead of JSR 241: The Groovy Spec, replacing James Strachan. Guillaume will thus see Groovy through the upcoming release of 1.0. Guillaume's goal is to make Groovy the de facto and enterprise standard scripting language for the JVM.
In related news, the first Groovy & Grails seminar will be starting this summer in London.
Community comments
good news
by Michael Neale,
Re: good news
by Floyd Marinescu,
good news
by Michael Neale,
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I really hope things work out with Groovy. I think the Oracle "endorsement" is a good shot in the arm. I also think that groovy is out of the hype limelight, which is a good thing for a language.
Re: good news
by Floyd Marinescu,
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Agreed. I think there may be some more big corporate backers on the way. I don't think the Java vendor community wants to see us moving towards Ruby even if JRuby works, it would mean a whole new platform for them to invest in tooling and support for, with little return during these early stages. Groovy on the other hand plays better with Java.