Guillaume Laforge has announced the release of the first release candidate of Groovy. The plan is to release a final version by the end of December 2006; the actual changes will apply more to those who are knee-deep in Groovy already, but if you're interested in using Groovy, you should take a look at this release. It's a good time to evaluate Groovy's place in Java; where should it be used, in your opinion?

First of all, congratulations for getting out the first release candidate. Many people have been looking at Groovy for a long time, but were waiting for a "final" version. In the past, there were many discussions about the early hype about Groovy and the syntax changes, but now it's time to take a detailled look at what is there. We are using Groovy currently for "classical" scripting activities like DB changes, reading/changing different files (eg. XML) and other system oriented activities. And Groovy is great for that! Now that Groovy is moving towards version 1.0, we will use it also for application development. I like Groovy because: - it is a dynamic language (closures, no type declaration necessary, meta object protocol, ..), but - it fits perfectly with Java (which distinguishes it from JRuby), - it can easily access existing libraries and - it does not try to get around the good things, that we have in the Java platform. I think that Groovy is great and can and should be used for many types of applications. How can Groovy really take of? What's the "killer application"? Grails! I would encourage everybody to have a look at this a framework, that is using some of the ideas of Ruby on Rails (eg. Convention over Configuration), while leveraging the strength of the Java platform (eg. Hibernate). See http://grails.codehaus.org/ Give Groovy (and Grails) a try. It's well worth the time! Stephan

I saw many groovy demos and usage patterns in JavaPolis 2006. GPath looked really impressive so I'll give it a try right now.

Congratulations! What is going on with specification and JSR-241? Nebojsa