The A-Z of Programming Languages: Groovy

Groovy project manager Guillaume Laforge says the Groovy programming language was designed to make life simpler for developers through its seamless integration with the underlying Java platform. "There's really no impedance mismatch between Groovy and Java," he says. "That's why lots of projects integrate Groovy, or why companies adopt the [Groovy on Rails (Grails)] Web framework." Laforge says that Groovy finds frequent use as a superglue for tying together various application elements, and he points out that Groovy is often the preferred language when developers must integrate and employ an additional language in their applications. Laforge says that Grails offers an advanced integration of the best-of-breed open source software components to provide a pleasant experience for developers while also addressing various other aspects such as the project build, the persistence, a rich view layer, and an extensible plug-in system. Laforge says Groovy's support for closures is his favorite feature. "With closures, you can start thinking differently about how you solve your everyday problems, or create complex algorithms," he says. "Closures give you an additional layer of abstraction for encapsulating code and behavior, and even data [thanks to Groovy builders]. Also, with various helper methods added to Java collections, in combination with closures, you've got the power of functional languages at your disposal."

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Red Hat, IBM, Novell Major Contributors to Exploding Linux Kernel Development

The Linux Foundation reports that 2.7 million lines of code have been added to the Linux kernel over the past 16 months. The open source project now has more than 11.5 million lines of code. The number of lines added, removed, and changed each day has increased 70 percent, 68 percent, and 32 percent, respectively, from the previous report in April 2008. And the number of developers contributing to each kernel release cycle, which comes every two to three months, has risen about 10 percent. More than 5,000 individual developers from nearly 500 companies have contributed to the kernel, and the greatest support continues to come from Red Hat, IBM, and Novell. Participation from the individual development community has doubled over the past three years. The increasing rate of change and jump in contributors is a sign of a "vibrant and active community, constantly causing the evolution of the kernel in response to a number of different environments it is used in," the report says. The foundation also suggests the pace of development will continue to accelerate

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