Groovy 1.7 goes final

Groovy 1.7, the open source dynamic language for Java, has been released after two betas and two release candidates. Announcing the update's release by the Groovy developers and SpringSource, Guillaume Laforge said that the development of Groovy was being shaped by projects such as the Grails web stack, Griffon Swing framework and other Groovy based developments. Looking forward to 2010, Laforge says that developers should expect "a more modular and even faster Groovy, additional abilities for more readable and expressive DSLs, and many more exciting features!".

The new version includes more support for Java constructs like anonymous inner classes and nested classes, enhancements to annotations, which allow annotations to be added to imports, packages and variable declarations, and a more expressive and readable output from assertions.

Other improvements include a rewrite of the GroovyScriptEngine, a better GroovyConsole which shows line numbers, batch updates and transactions in Groovy's SQL support, and enhancements to Grape, Groovy's module system. Full details of these and all the other changes in Groovy 1.7 are available in the release notes, which also notes the avaiability of a much improved Eclipse Plug-in for Groovy development. Groovy is licensed under a BSD/Apache style licence and version 1.7 is available to download.

(djwm)