Things are getting Groovy-er

Groovy fans rejoice: a move to the Apache Software Foundation is now confirmed. To alleviate concerns about his recent Restlet role, founder Guillaume Laforge has announced that the Groovy project will be moving, with news breaking today of the successful submission.

UPDATE: Groovy has been submitted to the Apache Incubator in order to become part of the Foundation’s efforts.

Apache Software Foundation Vice Chairman Greg Stein welcomed the submission with the following statement:

Groovy has a diverse and active community that will find ‘The Apache Way’ of meritocratic development a perfect complement to their existing recognition of the value and benefits of the Apache License, under which their code is released. The ASF’s proven framework will offer Groovy the organizational, legal, financial, and infrastructure support needed to continue to be available to its established user base and millions of developers worldwide.

Things are looking positive for the JVM language Groovy, with its founder Guillaume Laforge announcing plans for the project to join the Apache Software Foundation. The announcement comes after several talks with ASF, Eclipse Foundation and the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Moving and grooving

Laforge was in the limelight recently for different reasons, after news broke of his appointment as Product and Development Ninja at Restlet. The Restlet team will be taking on Laforge in a lead development role for API tools, with Laforge himself hoping to make APIs “Groovy-er”.

Groovy’s move to Apache is said by Laforge to be a demonstration to the Groovy community that “the project is here for the long term, regardless of any funding from particular sponsoring organizations and regardless of any changes to the team of committers over time”.

The Apache Software Foundation seems to have been chosen as it best fits the constraints and philosophy of Groovy’s core team. The process of submitting a proposal will soon be underway, with Laforge commenting on proposed changes during the incubation period:

If the proposal is accepted, the discussions we had on the mailing list highlighted some grey areas that we are going to deal with during that incubation process and we will be very happy to work with our mentors to make sure Groovy remains a major OSS project in the JVM ecosystem.

If the proposal is accepted, Laforge will the chair of the Project Management Committee (PMC), which would govern the project. Apache PMCs are composed of project committers, however Laforge would still be working full-time at Restlet.

I think that #groovylang moving to @TheASF is a great decision. This is a great community and I look forward to continuing to be a member. — Kyle Boon (@kyleboon) March 5, 2015

This is great news for supporters and fans of Groovy, who took to social media in praise of the move. After the Restlet announcement, many users had themselves a little panic about what might be happening in the Groovy and Grails community, with Laforge looking to alleviate those concerns.

Speaking of Grails, a new version of the website has launched, with founder Graeme Rocher posting about the infrastructure update Grails had last week. The new website is a Grails 2.4.4 application, with part of it statically generated. The statically generated part can be found on Github.

With the project coming into the last month of Pivotal sponsorship, Rocher was determined to make it easier for the community to contribute to Grails. The team have also implemented continuous deployment, which supports the complete Grails build infrastructure in its migration over to Travis CI.