Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Groovy & Grails Happenings in the New Year

First let me say happy new year to all readers. I myself have just got back into the swing of things after spending some family time over in Spain.

It is nice to get back and see that even though with the holiday period the good stuff coming out of the Groovy and Grails community doesn't stop.

First up we have the announcement from the Pragmatic (almost mistyped that Programmatic!) Programmers that, shock/horror, they don't just do Ruby books, but have announced 2 new Groovy books: Groovy Recipes by Scott Davis and Programming Groovy by Venkat - thee of the unpronounceable surname ;-)

Next, for those of you who haven't been following Glen Smith's exploits in producing his Grails based blog called Gravl, checkout the latest screencast its looking really awesome. In the spirit of consuming ones own dog food, once he has done I may well migrate to Gravl!

Finally, the Grails user community continues to be busy with new plug-in releases and so on. The most significant of which is James' (who has also built his on Grails based blog) Google Chart API plug-in which looks really nice and Andreas' RichUI plug-in which adds a whole bunch of new tags to create rich components like tabbed panes, tag clouds, tree widgets to name just a few. Most of the components seem to take advantage of the Yahoo UI JavaScript library. Neat stuff.

As for the Grails 1.0 release we were supposed to ship that by the end of the year, but with the Groovy release coming a bit later and our aims to deliver a really high quality to release we decided to push it back a bit. The target is this month sometime so stay tuned.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's also a dedicated Groovy/Grails conference in the Washington D.C. area in February. You can find more information at http://www.groovygrails.com/gg/conference/home?showId=131

It also appears they are using Grails to host the conference web site. :-)

James said...

Thanks for the nod, it motivated me to wrap up the last few threads keeping it from fully implementing Google's spec.