Groovy Blog from Feb 28, 2005

Guillaume Laforge posted on Feb 28, 2005
Groovy-1.0-beta-10 is released with an EAP of the JSR parser

Dear users, and developers,

The Groovy development team and the JSR-241 Expert Group are pleased to announce the release of Groovy beta 10. There has been again a lot of work done on two main fronts: fixing a fair amount of bugs, and releasing an Early Access Preview of the new parser developed as part of the JSR effort.

On the Classic Groovy front, among other things:

  • some bad typing problems are fixed,
  • a few error messages are improved for more readability and a safer user experience,
  • better exception handling is achieved,
  • and the binary scripts now have proper executable permissions set.

This release also includes an Early Access version of the JSR parser. This is disabled by default; so that "Classic Groovy" is used out of the box. To enable the JSR parser you can configure the JSR parser property on the CompilerConfiguration object; or use the groovy.jsr system property:

or:

The next release, which should be out next month, will enable the JSR parser by default and will be tagged with "jsr" as a new naming scheme, to break from the line of betas. So please consider this release a migration release to the new JSR parser.

To check that the new parser is enabled, try this snippet in the shell:

which will print "x = 123" in JSR groovy and "x = $x" in classic.

In case you want to embed Groovy with the JSR parser, you'll need the groovy-jsr-xxx.jar and antlr-xxx.jar on your classpath. In future releases we'll integrate this all together in the groovy-all-xxx.jar

If you fancy it, please help us test this first cut at the new Groovy grammar, and make it a better Groovy (smile) I hope you will enjoy this preview.

Here are the release notes for this new beta (mostly related to Groovy Classic):

Bugs

  • GROOVY-76 Broken GroovyMock test case
  • GROOVY-255 Throwing Exceptions in Builders confuses groovy
  • GROOVY-305 single character strings should be coerced to characters if it helps
  • GROOVY-310 Subclasses cannot access inhierited static fields from implicit class context
  • GROOVY-325 Static closures have wrong owner object
  • GROOVY-342 try/catch not catching
  • GROOVY-368 character sequences (String.next()) don't work as expected
  • GROOVY-382 Cast to int[] fails at runtime
  • GROOVY-473 creating primitive type arrays don't actually create primitive type arrays
  • GROOVY-525 after upack, files in bin aren't executable
  • GROOVY-532 += gives me "Unable to pop operand off"
  • GROOVY-540 Cannot catch imported exception
  • GROOVY-559 Can't find constractor with an array parameter
  • GROOVY-564 Verify error with polymorphic functions
  • GROOVY-566 throwing exception within each() closure gets changed to InvokerInvocationException
  • GROOVY-593 XMLBuilder makes broken XML if data contains &
  • GROOVY-598 array of object in class
  • GROOVY-669 groovyc creates class files that does not verify java.lang.VerifyError
  • GROOVY-675 multiple backslashes and backslash plus dollarsign are not correctly interpreted
  • GROOVY-696 Groovy misses first exception
  • GROOVY-649 Seriously Large Memory Leak (reproducable)
  • GROOVY-703 Check null pointer condition in method convertToByteArray
  • GROOVY-704 Primitive function arguments cause VerifyError
  • GROOVY-708 Misleading error message
  • GROOVY-709 println error reporting not correct
  • GROOVY-713 Method Overload with Primitive Array Parameters
  • GROOVY-714 Which method should be called in this case (primitive array vs its wrapper array)?
  • GROOVY-717 method call for method with same name as a field causes wierdness
  • GROOVY-721 respect null values when unboxing arrays
  • GROOVY-722 don't use boxing for arrays created when calling methods
  • GROOVY-724 class cast exception when using empty boolean arrays
  • GROOVY-726 no line number in exception stack trace
  • GROOVY-727 Parsing Error for the Multiplication Operator in New Groovy
  • GROOVY-733 NullpointerException instead of MissingMethodException
  • GROOVY-738 Parsing Error for Bitwise Operations in NewGroovy
  • GROOVY-739 Handling the Meta Character \b in String or GString
  • GROOVY-743 Accessing private field gives MissingPropertyException, not

New Features

  • GROOVY-692 minv/maxv where closure computes value
  • GROOVY-702 GroovySQL should allow a closure to be registered to configure the JDBC statement before use
  • GROOVY-744 Allow groovy script extensions to be left off when running from command line

Improvements

  • GROOVY-375 classloader enhancements to MetaClass
  • GROOVY-542 bitwise "or", "and" and "xor"
  • GROOVY-678 swing 2d example code cleaning
  • GROOVY-680 the tarball does not include +x permissions on the bin/ scripts
  • GROOVY-701 log error/throw exception in Builder
  • GROOVY-710 Removed a needless IOException from GroovyShell
  • GROOVY-718 improve error reporting for throwables
  • GROOVY-730 Add the "oneRow" method to the groovy.sql.Sql class
  • GROOVY-745 more readabel error message when script name is equal to an variable name
  • GROOVY-746 use equals to compare strings