Dear all,
I hope you'll pardon my cross-posting, but I just wanted to wish you
all a very groovy christmas and a happy new year, with your families
and friends!
Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed to improve Groovy with
suggestions, ideas, bug reports, patches, test cases, documentation,
tutorials, and so on. The great and brilliant developers we have on
the project, like "blackdrag" or "tug", is one thing, but without the
whole passionate and dedicated community, Groovy would not be worth
it! So, well done everybody, and I'm looking forward to continuing
working with you all.
This year's been pretty interesting, and for those who've been there
for over a year, I'm sure you'll all have noticed the great progresses
we made to improve the quality of the project, with better error
reporting, much less weird bugs, etc. Of course, our efforts won't
stop there, because Groovy's still not perfect, and there's always a
lot of things we can improve or fix, but I hope you'll all be there
along with the Groovy developers to help us reach another level of
quality and stability, improve the user experience, particularly for
newcomers, and to evangelize the project to your friends and
colleagues.
Groovy's momentum is still quite strong, and we've noticed a lot of
interest from big corporations into integrating Groovy. We've also had
our first Groovy job posting. It's a sure sign of Groovy's success if
companies are embedding Groovy in their commercial products and
applications.
The Groovy community is very strong too and very active: the groovy
lists have got a lot of subscribers with almost 400 persons on
groovy-user, 250 on groovy-dev and a bit more than 120 on groovy-jsr.
The Groovy project is one of the most successful Codehaus projects in
terms of downloads or page views. Moreover, speaking about community,
there will even be a first informal (French) Groovy user group meeting
in january, so if you're around Paris then, don't hesitate to come!
Next year should be another very interesting year too!
First of all, we'll release Groovy 1.0. I don't dare giving an
accurate target release date this time, because it's mostly impossible
for a few guys working on their spare time only. But I hope it'll be
pretty soon. The Groovy conference I organized in Paris last november
put us on track for fixing the last sucky bits of the language and the
runtime, along with a few improved features. So we're really seeing
the end of the tunnel, and please stay tuned for more information on
that topic for a more detailed roadmap.
Secondly, 2006 should also be a Groovy year because we'll have
outstanding documentation references through the means of two books on
Groovy which will hit the shelves probably before JavaOne. The first
book is lead by the long time Groovy expert and developer Dierk König,
along with some contributions from Andy Glover (author of numerous
Groovy articles on DeveloperWorks) and yours truly. This book will be
published by Manning, and be called "Groovy in Action". I sincerly
think it'll become THE Groovy reference for medium to advanced Java
developers, and this effort will also lead us to reuse parts of the
book to overhaul and update the online documentation on our website.
There should be also another book more targeted at beginners learning
a language for the first time, writen by two University professors
teaching Groovy to their students.
Final point, I would like to thank Graeme Rocher, Grails project lead,
for his wonderful work on Grails, a very Groovy-inspired and
Groovy-based MVC framework soon able to compete with the likes of Ruby
on Rails. Grails is a very promising framework which will really
simplify the development of webapps in tremendous ways. I'm confident
that Grails will be key to the success of Groovy, and mutually, that
Groovy is bringing a lot of power to the framework. With a release in
2006 too, I hope Grails will be the killer application for Groovy!
Many thanks to everybody, and again, on behalf of the Groovy
developers, merry christmas and happy new year to you all!
--
Guillaume Laforge
Groovy Project Manager
http://glaforge.free.fr/blog/groovy
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