I'm very happy to announce that the japanese edition of Groovy in Action has just hit the shelves.
Please visit the publisher's page or amazon.jp.
Kazuchika Sekiya and his five friends did an awesome job in not only translating the book "as is" but also updating it to the latest Groovy version (1.5.6), adapting all listings and explanations. Furthermore, they went through all known errata of the original version.
Above all, they did not blindly translate word-by-word but challened the meaning of every sentence, asked for clarification, and came up with improved wordings that avoid any kind of ambiguity.
It should not be left unmentioned that the translators work for Sun Microsystems Japan in their day job but did all that hard work in their spare time.
I'm very thankful for the experience of having seen this translation develop and now seeing the grace of the final result. Let's spread the word about Groovy!
Thank you, guys - domo arigato gozaimasu!
After over a year of poking and prodding at the various parts of desktop Java the Groovy swing developers are proud to announce the first release of Griffon, a Grails-like tool for Swing development. While not yet industrial strength we felt it was important to put out a release so people can get a feel for what Griffon is and where it will be going. And since all good computer scientists start counting from zero, 0.0 seemed to be the perfect release number.
What are some of the highlights of Griffon?
- A Grails like build system for desktop apps, including targets to run the application.
- A directory structure that rewards MVC separation of code.
- Use of Groovy programming language features to reinforce MVC separation (builders, @Bindable annotation, metaclass method injection, scripts, etc).
- A view layer based on Groovy's SwingBuilder, allowing for a declarative layout of GUI code.
- An infrastructure to allow seamless injection of other widget libraries. JIDE and SwingX are supported out of the box.
- Automatic packaging and signing for WebStart, Applet, and traditional application deployment.
Why call it Grails-like instead of rails-like? The structure of the directories and some of the design idioms do have a heritage back to Ruby on Rails, but Griffon is more inspired by Grails than it was by Rails. And by "inspired" I mean "taking large chunks of Grails code to bootstrap the codebase" (thanks to the ASL 2.0 this is permissible). Not all Grails features have been brought over yet. Plugins and GORM are two notable standouts that we would like to add in future releases.
To download the current release please visit the wiki page at Download Griffon and follow the links. There is also an installation guide and a quick start tutorial on the wiki as well.
The distribution also comes with three demo apps developed in Griffon: Greet, a Twitter client; GrailsSnoop, a swing wrapper around the Grails docs; and WidgetKitchenSink, a demo app of various widgets supported by Griffon. These applications live in the samples directory and can be run directly by "griffon run-app".
There is clearly much more that can be done, and this is just the beginning. Future releases hope to bring in client side GORM, pack200 support, plugin support, and more GUI libraries. Like most open source projects external contributions and participation are always welcome. For questions and comments there is a griffon-user@groovy.codehaus.org mailing list set up.