News from June, 2007

A couple of months ago, the Groovy 1.1-beta-1 version was released with annotation support. In the latest snapshots, this has just been extended to also include annotations on Method parameters. See Using Popper with Groovy for an example.

Version 1.0.1 of  the Groovy Eclipse Plugin is now available.

Thanks to the the Groovy Team for all their work, to Jay Zimmerman, founder of "No Fluff, Just Stuff" Java symposiums (http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com) who's financial support enabled the many changes that were implemented, and to the Groovy community for the patches and bug reports that helped add the polish to this release.

The URL for the update site is http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/update/.

The most significant feature that user's will notice is that content assist is now available in the Groovy editor. Through type inference, the completions that are available are the same as those for  statically typed variables. The completions that are available are:
-Properties, fields and methods.
-Completions of class names.
-Completions for the Default Groovy Methods.
-Completions for category methods for code inside of 'use' blocks.
-Implement getter/setter code assist. For example, type toSt<ctrl+space> and a completion for 'String toString() {}' is available.
When possible, types are inferred for duck typed fields/properties, local variables and method return types. Plugin extension points are available for code assist as well as type inference.

Under the covers, the plugin has been significantly refactored. What was a large monolith is now a collection of plugins. This should make it much easier for developers to follow the code in the plugin and submit patches for bug fixes and feature enhancements. Support for coding the plugin in Groovy has also been implemented. Parts of the plugin have been written in Groovy.A developers guide is now available as Eclipse help. It documents the various components and extension points introduced in this release.

Finally, Groovy has been packaged in its own plugin. This should make it possible to enable different versions of Groovy to be easily used by GroovyEclipse in the future, and for end users who want to use the very latest Groovy release.