Dear all, The Groovy development team is really pleased and proud to announce the release of the *final version of Groovy 1.8.0*!
After a lot of work and efforts throughout four betas and four release candidates, version 1.8 of Groovy has been long in the making, but is packed with *tons of new features and enhancements*, for your productivity, and your pleasure. In particular, you'll be happy to learn about: - the new Domain-Specific Language authoring capabilities<http://bit.ly/groovy-18#Groovy1.8releasenotes-CommandchainsfornicerDomainSpecificLanguages> for more readability and expressivity of your business rules, - the runtime performance improvements<http://bit.ly/groovy-18#Groovy1.8releasenotes-Performanceimprovements> , - the bundling of the GPars parallel and concurrency library<http://bit.ly/groovy-18#Groovy1.8releasenotes-GParsbundledwithintheGroovydistribution> , - the built-in JSON support<http://bit.ly/groovy-18#Groovy1.8releasenotes-NativeJSONsupport> , - the new compile-time meta-programming features<http://bit.ly/groovy-18#Groovy1.8releasenotes-NewASTTransformations> (several new useful AST transformations), - the new functional programming aspects of closures<http://bit.ly/groovy-18#Groovy1.8releasenotes-Closureenhancements> , - and much more. To get all the details, with code samples, we have prepared an *in-depth release notes <http://bit.ly/groovy-18> document*. Please have a look at it to learn more about the features listed above, and discover other smaller enhancements as well. You can download Groovy 1.8 in our download section<http://groovy.codehaus.org/Download> and you can have a look at the list of JIRA tickets<http://bit.ly/groovy18tickets> that have found their way into this major release. We'd like to thank all those who participated and contributed to this release: users, contributors, committers, framework writers, IDE developers, book authors. Without you all, Groovy wouldn't be the great productive language it is now. And again, without you all, Groovy wouldn't be surrounded by its *vibrant, active and rich ecosystem*, giving you advanced tools and frameworks for building web applications (Grails<http://grails.org/> , Gaelyk <http://gaelyk.appspot.com/>) or rich desktop applications (Griffon<http://griffon.codehaus.org/>), for building your own projects (Gradle <http://www.gradle.org/>), for testing your projects (Spock <http://spockframework.org/>, Geb<http://geb.codehaus.org/>), for tackling the concurrency and parallel problems on our multi-core / multi-processor architectures (GPars <http://gpars.codehaus.org/>), or for improving the quality of your Groovy code bases (CodeNarc<http://codenarc.sourceforge.net/> for static code analysis, GContracts<https://github.com/andresteingress/gcontracts/wiki/> for design by contract). Enjoy this release! -- Guillaume Laforge Groovy Project Manager Head of Groovy Development at SpringSource http://www.springsource.com/g2one
