Grails 1.1 beta 1 is out, and the release notes give a nice snapshot of some of the sweet new features coming.

Groovy is a script language which is based on the Java Virtual machine. This article gives a short overview of its functionality. The usage of Eclipse for developing Groovy will also be explained. I use this article as a kind a scatch book to make note to myself. I try to structure this article in a way that I hope it can be useful to others but I do not claim that this is a complete and all including description of Groovy.

Maybe you have been wondering why I’ve been so quiet on the blog. Maybe you’re on the Grails-User or Grails-Dev mailing list and have been wondering where all my questions about the corner cases of GORM have originated. Maybe you’ve been watching my GitHub work and noticing it’s trailed off recently. Or maybe this will come as a complete surprise to you.

Last night Rod Johnson kicked-off the 2008 springOne conference with a keynote emphasizing the new SpringSource slogan "Weapons for the War on Java Complexity." During the first day of the conference, no technology fit that billing more than Grails.

The time has come finally for a release of the Groovy Eclipse plugin. The plugin has been published to the update site. There are a few notes to make. First off there is now refactoring support inside the plugin for your Groovy Code. To see this demonstrated head over to this wiki page. Besides documentation there are some pretty cool flash demos of the features which should entice. Second, the groovy plugin now supports the 1.5.7 version of Groovy.

Out of the box, groovy gives you a number of powerful methods to iterate over lists and maps. What if you have a class that doesn’t extend list or map? How hard is it to empower that class with the groovy iteration methods? Since it’s groovy you know it’s easy!

The latest GroovyMag issue is now available, with articles on iUI iPhone development, the Testing plugin, Swing apps in Groovy and more. Watch the intro video to learn more.

Information and Google Book Preview for the new Coding4Fun book

I’ve received a lot of requests on the mailing lists and the GrailsUI JIRA for more documentation than is provided in the plugin reference page.

An article on how to add new scripting languages support in groovy (bash is given as an example) via launching of external programs and type expansion via metaclass.

SpringSource and the Grails development team are pleased to announce the 1.1 Beta 1 release of the Grails web application development framework.

Okay, it is still a work in progress, . . . But, I have pushed the Griffon Collab Todo application to Github (http://github.com/jshingler/gcollabtodo/wikis). Griffon Collab Todo is a reimplementation of the Swing Client found in Chapter 13 of Beginning Groovy and Grails using Griffon.

I'm proud to announce that JideBuilder 2.0.1 has been released. Two things are noteworthy of this release

Below is a post I wrote a little while back but never published. If you’re wanting to learn better how closures work or how to use currying, this can be a really fun exercise. I didn’t publish this earlier because I didn’t want to encourage anyone to implement this in production code as if this were some kind of pattern.

I was having some fun with Groovy the other day as I created quick and dirty simple script to find out the duration between 2 dates. I've always wanted a handy utility that could answer more or less precisely questions like 'how much time has passed since I bought my MacBook pro?' or 'how old was I when I moved to the United States?', etc.

Before I started using Grails I used Spring MVC and in fact i still do i my day job. Any way one of the things Spring provided was the Errors interface. This allowed you to add your own error message that would end up available to your view layer. By using methods such as

I hang out with Ruby guys and gals when I can. These folks are such a blessing to my brain. If you don’t have Ruby friends, find some. Google for “yourcity ruby brigade” to find a Ruby user group in your area.

If you’re using Groovy, it’s even easier because you don’t have to implement Runnable - you can just pass a closure to the executor (since Closure implements Runnable).

One of the many cool features available in Groovy is "Duck Typing". The phrase comes from "If it walks like a duck, if it talks like a duck then it is probably a duck".

Using Grails as a CMS, often times you want your users to add and remove files to a page similar to the way assets are attached to a page in the Confluence Wiki. I recently had to write a controller to handle files upload and download, and thought it might be interesting to share this since it is done so often in the Grails world.

This post brought up a good example of some buggy behavior in Groovy when it comes to GStrings and Maps. However, I don’t think the problem is in the Map, but in mixing/matching java.lang.String’s with groovy.lang.GString’s, and in particular on existing Java class methods that expect Strings. Taking the two examples from the previous post..

No, it's not the next game in the Lego video game series. It's what I've recently checked into the development tree of Griffon: Plug-in support. This will solve a lot of bloat problems with the framework with regards to adding the latest (and some of the not so latest) bells and whistles for your Griffon applications.

Get the power of RSpec for your normal Java app using Groovy

The Session List for CodeMash 09 has been announced! CodeMash is a rising conference that targets a variety of platforms and development languages such as Java, .Net, Ruby and PHP. Of course Groovy wouldn't be the exception, of the 63 announced sessions these are the ones related to the hip language with a cool name

Recently, my friend and colleague asked some questions about packaging naming conventions in Grails. I think they were excellent questions, and I wouldn’t be surprised if others were wondering about the same things. You could get into arguments with some guys over stuff like this, but here is my opinion…