In Groovy and Grails, Programming links

Groovy 1.0 is nigh.

Posted by: on Dec 5, 2006 | 2 Comments

It’s great news that Groovy is finally very close to a 1.0 release as RC1 has just been released.

A lot of work has gone into this by the key developers, even though some of them don’t necessarily appreciate the importance of 1.0 as a number in terms of marketing and adoption of a product within many organisations.

I’m very glad that they have reached this point and look forward to the full 1.0 release, and appreciate their hard work.

The next thing I really want from Groovy is for the code base to be subject to public code coverage reports and following from that huge increases in unit test code coverage to prevent regressions after 1.0. Surely a big part of this will form a TCK to accompany the JSR for the language, but there is so much non-JSR code in the way of APIs and helper classes that is not adequately covered by unit tests I’m sure.

There doesn’t seem to be a rigid habit from all developers of applying unit tests for all fixes they make to the codebase, which is slightly worrying given the importance and complexity of Groovy.

2 Comments

  1. ZedroS
    December 9, 2006

    Indeed, an 1.0 version is quite important for newcomers, at least me ;)

    I didn’t want to spend time on something constantly evolving, especially when starting : syntax evolution and the like can be pretty disturbing for a newbe.

    Now that it should be pretty stable I think and I hope it’ll be fast and easy to discover groovy and grails.

    BTW, a side, coming from a little Tapestry background : I hope you plan to have a good backward compatibility in upcoming releases of Groovy/Grails. IT helps a lot widespread adoption !

    ++
    ZedroS

    Reply
  2. Marc Palmer
    December 12, 2006

    As far as backward compatibility goes, this should be a given for Groovy, as it will conform to a language specification. You can add but you can’t take away!

    With Grails, we are working to maintain backwards compatibility but at this early stage we are deprecating some features to keep it clean as it evolves, and phasing them out in the next big release – to minimize confusion in documentation etc while Grails heads towards a 1.0. I am sure that once we hit 1.0 we will not break anything in 1.x versions :)

    Reply

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