Last week I sat down with the gang at the Grails Podcast and talked shop for about 45 minutes. We talked about a lot of different topics such as Groovy, Lean software, Spock, Groovy in Action, and of course Hackergarten. Check out the full audio and shownotes over at Grails Podcast Episode 125.

I got a chance to sit down and talk to Java Champion Antonio Goncalves about the past, present, and future of Java EE. I’ve been working for the last six months in a heavy EE/SOA stack, and it’s been interesting to see the advantages and disadvantages. I definitely come from the other side of the world where specifications aren’t seen as an inherent sign of quality, and frameworks not sanctioned by Sun/Oracle are not to be feared. It was fun to get his opinions about this stuff.

The full interview is on the JetBrains Zone at DZone. We’re both JetBrains Academy Members and we’re slowly interviewing each other.

P.S. This is the first post I’ve ever made that mentioned Java Enterprise Edition. I suspect the next time EE is mentioned will be in another few years

This week is a bumper week for me. I’m going away for the holidays and I wanted to clear out all the old blog posts I had in the “pending” state. Then both InfoQ and DZone finally go around to publishing a video and an interview respectively.

First up is an interview I did with fellow JetBrains Academy Member Radoslaw Holewa. In the interview we talk about open source, Groovy, static code analysis, and of course IntelliJ IDEA. Radoslaw and I will both be heading to the 33rd Degree and GeeCon conferences this Spring, so register now and meet up with us!

Second is a full 90 minute video of my presenting at 2gx. The topic is “Slimmed Down Software – A Lean, Groovy Approach”, based on a series of articles I wrote this year. It’s not a bad performance… but geez 90 minutes is a long time. It’s like trying to perform a one man show. I made the unfortunate decision to include a poop joke about midway through that I kinda regret. Oh well. I doubt I will ever truly grow out of potty humor.

Enjoy and see you in 2011!

Early this week I pestered Dierk Koenig into letting me ask him a few questions about Groovy past and present and the upcoming release of Groovy in Action 2nd Edition. If you aren’t aware already, Dierk is the author of Groovy in Action, a Canoo Fellow, and a Groovy, Grails and GPars committer.

Hamlet: The original Groovy in Action was published almost 4 years ago using (I believe) Groovy 1.0, and the 2nd Edition of the book is scheduled next year to coincide with the 1.8 release. What are the biggest productivity improvements between Groovy today and that of 4 years ago?

Dierk: Well, there are so many cool developments that I hardly now where to start, and in the end I will probably end up forgetting the most important one. Anyway, I will try.

One of the most important features is backward compatibility. I think the Groovy team has done a very good job in advancing the language without introducing breaking changes.

For me, it is often the small changes that make a big difference like “power assert“. A newcomer may dismiss this as a minor thing but it is of ubiquitous use, beside showing the language power of Groovy. I could mention many more improvements: the completion of the GDK, Mixins, more Metaprogramming options, command expressions, the Grape packaging system, and so on, but two features make the biggest difference in productivity for me: AST Transformations and IDE support.

AST Transformations use annotations to demarcate classes, methods, properties, and the likes in order to
achieve an enriched compilation. You want your class to be immutable? Simply give it the @Immutable annotation and you have all the goodness. There are endless possibilities with this approach and it comes without runtime costs!

IDE support has evolved far beyond what I ever thought possible for a dynamic language. Code completion for dynamically added methods? Yes, that’s possible! And even though the Groovy compiler has no need for type inference, the IDEs can give code completion on inferred types. Cross-language refactoring? Done. And the list goes on…

Hamlet: In 2007 Groovy won the JAX Innovation award. Is Groovy still a leader in JVM innovation?

Dierk: Looking into the roadmap for Java 7 and 8, it is pretty obvious that many developers have fallen in love with Groovy features and this forces Java to provide equivalents for at least a subset. Groovy has become and still is a pioneer for Java language features, simply because we strive for language features that make us more productive while keeping the solution Java-friendly.

Hamlet: James Gosling wrote a famous paper called “The Feel of Java” in which he described Java not in terms of language features but in terms of a general mindset and philosophy. You’ve been involved with Groovy since almost the beginning. What is the “Feel of Groovy” and has it changed in the 7 years the language has been alive?

Dierk: There are two sides to this: the user view and the developer view.

As a user of the Groovy language, I would say that Groovy still feels as groovy as in the early days. The important points are:
- Groovy is dynamic (that’s the nature)
- Groovy is feature-rich (that’s where the fun comes from)
- Groovy is Java-friendly (hence easy to use)
Groovy always was and still is a “getting things done” language. It is pragmatic – as opposed to being dogmatic about language design theory.

For a developer, the feel of Groovy has changed. The early days were a bit of a wild-west but since version 1.0 (and not coincidentally the release of Groovy in Action) we feel a high obligation to evolve the language in a controlled fashion. In my perception, Groovy has become the de-facto industry standard for dynamic programming on the JVM and many projects and organisations rely on it.

Hamlet: Lastly, I see that readers can already download parts of Groovy in Action 2nd Edition from Manning’s MEAP program. Is the MEAP complete enough to be useful today or Groovy newcomers stick to reading the 1st edition for now?

Dierk: The first edition is still fully valid and for the sake of completeness I would advice newcomers to go with it. You can always buy the second edition later. Honestly, computer books are ridiculously cheap, especially if you compare it against the price-tag for the invested reading time (not even mentioning the invested writing time).

Hamlet: Thanks Dierk!

Dierk: My pleasure!

You can catch Dierk at the upcoming W-JAX conference this November in Münich. He will talk about parallel processing with Groovy, advantages and limitations of dynamic programming as well as about the Canoo RIA Suite.

Canoo Software Engineer Hamlet D’Arcy was interviewed for the GR8 conference about his professional background and his conference contribution as well as Groovy and the Canoo Hackergarten.

Here’s the link to the interview! And here are some pictures of Hamlet during Canoo Day 2010:

Enjoy a new video of Canoo Fellow Dierk König in action:

"Scala, Groovy, JRuby, Clojure - Which JVM language is for you?"

In this discussion, panel members Dierk König, Guillaume Laforge (Groovy), Charles Nutter (JRuby), Stefan Tilkov (Clojure) and Ted Neward (Scala) discuss with the audience the pros and cons of the popular JVM-based lanauges Scala, Groovy, JRuby and Clojure in order to attempt to reach a verdict of rank. The panellists try to logically wade through arguments based on the key concepts of each language along with their primary applications and try to resolve clichéd comparisons such as performance.

JAXenter interviewed Canoo Fellow Dierk König on Groovy++. Read the Interview in German or join the Groovy++ Group dedicated to discussions of experimental statically typed compiler for Groovy programming language!

Update: As from now, the interview is also available in English! By the way: What is “Groovy++”?

Dierk König: Groovy + + is an extension of Groovy, which makes Groovy code pretty much as fast as native Java. In addition, you get static type checking plus type inference, yielding the benefits of compile-time safety but without the noise. To use the language extension, you only need one additional jar file in the classpath. Then you can annotate the required code parts – classes for example – with @Typed. The rest happens automatically. This approach takes advantage of Groovy’s ability to hook into the compilation step with AST Transformations. The name “Groovy + +” indicates that it is still Groovy, and therefore encompasses the entire beauty of the language syntax while exceeding the standard characteristics. Read on!

Canoo has released a new sample application at ria-map.net. The application shows typical Web 2.0 interface elements such as tagging or Flickr-like editing fields.

I asked the developer, Jonas Zuberbühler, the following questions on the new Canoo sample application.

SW> What is riamap?

riamap is a Web 2.0 community site that maps the world of Rich Internet Applications. Unlike mere information aggregators on the topic, it builds on user contributions to assemble not only a list of current RIA technologies, but also how they relate to each other.

Users can explore what technologies are available, what they have in common, how they differentiate, what competitors they have and how they complement each other. These relations make up a graph that any user can extend by adding new connections or voting how strong any such connection based on his or her own judgment.

SW> What technologies did you use to build it?

We used Grails for the web application framework and Groovy as it is the perfect partner for implementing server-side logic.
In addition, we used Prototype, Scriptaculous and LivePipe to integrate AJAX features and to improve the user interface.

SW> Why did you select Grails? Why not adapt an existing PHP- or Java-based content management system?

Canoo has a strong footing in Java and Grails is the perfect choice for developing Web 2.0 applications on the Java platform. We can build on our solid understanding of this ecosystem and use all the existing tools for development, deployment and operations. On top of this, Grails provides us with the concise, expressive and interactive development style that modern applications require.

Further screenshots:

To get a login for riamap, sign up here to join riamap. Try out the various Web 2.0 interface features. If you feel like adding information on a RIA technology, enter the details here or edit an existing entry.

Listen to the podcast on Groovy and Grails (in German).