Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

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!

Watch an interesting interview (in German) with Dierk König about the actual language diversity in the Java community — Groovy, Scala, Clojure, JRuby and all the rest of them! If you are interested in this topic, we also recommend to take a look on the schedule of the Java Language Days 2010 (moderated by Dierk König and Markus Völter (itemis).

Recently, Dustin Marx postet his top ten of the most “Software Development Developments of 2009“. Here is a short summary as a basis for further discussion:

Changing Landscape of Software Development Conferences: Colorado Software Summit and SDWest and SD Best Practices terminated their long-running tradition in 2009. There is speculation that JavaOne 2009 may have been the last.

Java IDE Wars: IntelliJ IDEA has been the only one of the four leading Java IDEs that has not been available without charge. In 2009, the availability of an open source community edition of IntelliJ IDEA potentially changed the Java IDE landscape.

Groovy: Groovy claims to be “the most popular and successful dynamic language for the JVM”. According to Marx, this certainly seems to be the case (he mentions the high number of books on Groovy (and Grails) and the existence of a DZone area dedicated to Groovy (Groovy Zone) for evidence.

Java EE 6: Marx defines the December release of Java EE 6 as a significant development in the enterprise space.

Oracle buys Sun: According to Marx, even developers who do not use Sun or Oracle products are likely to be at least indirectly affected by this acquisition because it will almost certainly affect the entire software development competitive landscape.

Also included in the ranking were topics as:

• Programming Environments for Mobile Devices
• Bing Search Engine
• Scala
• Java SE 7 News
• Cloud Computing
• Google Chrome OS

If you are interested in Marx’ full review of 2009, please read his blog entry at JW Blogs. He also cited other annual reviews from JavaLobby and Computerworld. So what are last year’s most significant developments in software development from your point of view?

While preparing the second edition of “Groovy in Action”, Canoo Fellow Dierk König once again worked systematically through the language and came across a number of new features that slipped by his attention when they were added. His talk (from Groovy & Grails eXchange 2009, London) presents those features in a workshop-like manner with demos, live coding and lots of interaction with the audience. Watch the video on Skills Matter!

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Dierk with James Gosling during Jazoon 2009