Month: March 2004

JSR 241 has been approved as the specification for the Groovy language.

Groovy is an OO language similar to features found in Ruby, Python and Smalltalk, that compiles to Java bytecode and can be executed on a regular Java VM.

The goal of Groovy is to produce a scripting language that can provide RAD development features and fill the gap in Java development, where sometimes a scripting language is needed to perform simple tasks.

The Groovy project page is here: http://groovy.codehaus.org/

Sun have a ‘CoolStuff’ page on their site dedicated to new and interesting projects that some of their staff are looking at.

I’m not sure how this page is linked to elsewhere (I certainly did not know it existed), but I found a link to it from one of the JavaOne ’04 Sessions that is going to cover one of these Emerging Technology projects, ‘jvmstat’.

J2SE 1.4.1 and above has built in facilities for ‘instrumentation’ of the VM at runtime. The jvmstat project has a selection of interesting tools that allow you to examine the Garbage Collection behaviour of the VM at runtime.

The JavaOne ’04 session details are now online at their site: www.javaone04.com

Haven’t had time to take a look through to see whats going on this year, but will definitely be checking it out.

There’s an interesting thread on TheServerSide.com right now collecting a list of Who’s Who in the Java world… most of the obvious are there (James Gosling etc) but theres also a lot of other names of people of other lesser known technologies that obviously have gained respect in the community.