The Java Platform has evolved into a solid and mature enterprise application platform. One of the signs of a mature application platform is that there are a lot of spin-off techniques and options to integrate with other techniques. This article will go into detail about how to write JEE applications with Grails, a spin-off of traditional JEE application development, and Flex, a different technique that can be used with Java. Both frameworks can be highly productive. Combining the two frameworks holds the promise of building rich internet frontends to J2EE applications while retaining the high productivity.

Groovy project lead writes about Groovy 1.6 changes and improvements, including include performance enhancements, integration of JMX Builder, and OSGi readiness.

“Dynamic programming” is intriguing for a few reasons. The combined words do not directly refer to anything dynamic or programming, at least not in the sense attached to those words individually today. It is an algorithmic technique that takes a counterintuitive approach to realizing blazingly fast computation. We will explore this technique here and quickly implement an example using the facility available in Groovy.

In this second part of a two-part series, add to the Grails-powered Web services you created in Part 1. You will create a new search page, but this time using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to create the application. You will also use some richer UI widgets from the Ext GWT library.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) promise the dynamism and functionality of desktop applications through the browser. One of the key characteristics is moving your presentation layer to the client and backing it with a robust RESTful service layer on the server. This idea is being popularized with buzzwords like SOUI (Service Oriented User Interface) and SOFEA (Service Oriented Front End Architecture). In this article, the first of a two-part series, you will see how simple it is to create a Web service back end using Groovy's Grails Web application framework, and you will hook it up to an RIA developed with Adobe's Flex framework.

The shift toward multicore processing has fueled an interest in concurrent programming models like fork/join, actors, agents, and executors. While these models originated within different programming languages, many of them are encapsulated in GPars, a Groovy-based concurrency library. With Alex Miller as your guide, learn how to resolve concurrency problems using techniques drawn from both the functional and object-oriented programming worlds — and do it all using Groovy's familiar, Java™-friendly syntax.

Scott Davis continues the discussion about Groovy metaprogramming with an in-depth look at the @Delegate annotation, which blurs the distinctions between data type and behavior and static and dynamic typing.

In this Practically Groovy article, Scott Davis continues building the Groovy Twitter client named Gwitter that he began in Part 1. This time, he tackles HTTP Basic authentication and use of Groovy's ConfigSlurper to read in configuration settings.

This article tackles a topic that strikes fear into most server-side Java™ developers: Swing. As you'll learn, Groovy's SwingBuilder takes some of the sting out of this powerful yet complex GUI framework.

Iteration is fundamental to programming. You're constantly presented with things — a List, a File, a JDBC ResultSet — that you need to walk through item by item. The Java language nearly always gives you a way to step through whatever you need to, but the frustrating reality is that it doesn't offer a standard way to do so. Groovy's approach to iteration is one of the eminently practical ways in which Groovy programming parts ways with Java programming. Through a series of code examples (all available for download), you'll learn in this article how Groovy's versatile each() method lets you leave the Java language's iteration quirks behind.