This week's webinar will cover the architecture of GroovyBlogs, a blog aggregator site build by Glen Smith using Grails, GlassFish, OpenMQ and other technologies. Glen is also the author of Grails in Action. We are also trying to schedule a second speaker to provide a technical overview of Groovy. The presentation is on Thursday, May 14th, 12noon US Pacific, at TheAquarium Channel. Full details (and recordings) at the Show Page. Notice the different time to accomodate Canberra.

Reminder: Our news on CommunityOne and JavaOne are tagged JavaOne; and don't forget our Unconference and Party - attendance is free but registration is required, and space to the party is limited.

Two weeks ago Hudson reached release 1.300 (yep, three hundred releases, and the latest is already 1.303!) and Kohsuke wrote a short Commemoration Post summarizing some of the accomplishments. By all metrics the project is doing very well: I'll argue that Hudson is now the leading CI tool, the traffic on USERS@Hudson is over 1200/month and the project is very well grounded in the community with over 140 committers.

As adoption continues to grow, Kohsuke is adjusting the community releases to increase stability and we are working to deliver supported releases and other features from Sun soon. And, all along, the number of plugins and features will continue to grow, including a new CLI features that can be used to Provide a Groovy Shell.

So, here is a toast to Kohsuke's baby, may it Live Long and Prosper, may it continue to grow and reach many more releases and users. And we hope to see you all at the UnConference, and at CommunityOne and JavaOne

Grails 1.1 is available on the GlassFish v2 Update Center. Thanks to Vivek and the team for delivering on it, and to Alexis for the tip. Still working on making this available on the GFv3 Update Center; Alexis has started a series to help other groups contribute to the repository. Related entries are tagged Grails.

In recent sister website news, GroovyBlogs.org is the latest "story" about running a grails application on top of GlassFish v2. Glen Smith shares his thoughts on running his community web site for the past couple of years using GlassFish and how OpenMQ has recently increased the overall availability of the system.

asadmin, the GlassFish CLI (Command Line Interface) was recently featured on TheAquariumTV (archive) and is now available as episode #28 of the GlassFish Podcast. The original recording was edited down to make it more podcast friendly (shorter, less discussion, more presentation). Let us know how that works for you.

NetBeans continues to add support for Groovy and Grails as well as new tutorials. Check the Intro to Groovy, the NetBeans.TV Screencast and the new Introduction to Grails (thanks to Charles for the tip). Since Groovy fits very easily into Java it is easy to use with GlassFish: see Alexis' Zero to Grails in 5 and the GFv3 Prelude Docs. Also check out GroovyBlogs - Glen Smith has been running it on GlassFish v2 (Netcraft Report) for several months.

There is a clear resurgence of scripting on JVM and Groovy was very popular at Devoxx last week (see Sven's photo of the Whiteboard) - with the usual note on Sampling Errors! Related entries at TheAquarium are tagged scripting.

Last week Alexis posted a nice and short screencast showing how to use install Grails into GlassFish v3 Prelude using the new Update Center. Check out the Screencast, download GFv3 from here, and get started. Also, don't miss Vivek's 1hr webinar tomorrow on Scripting in GFv3 Prelude covering Ruby, Python and Groovy; we decided to leave PHP for another webinar.

And you may also want to check out Vivek's mini-presentation from last week's GFv3 Prelude Launch, as well as Geertjan's writeup and screencast on Grails and AJAX.

A compilation of today's news of interest - Special Release and Acquisitions Edition:

Our next full-length webinar is on Scripting (or Dynamic) Languages in GlassFish v3 Prelude this Thursday, Nov 13th. Same usual time, 11:15 am Pacific Time. This is a full-length (1 hour) version of the presentation that Vivek gave last week at GlassFish Day (SlideShare, Recording). Vivek will cover the multiplicity of languages supported and the technology; demos will be included For more details, check the Schedule and Channel Overview. Hope to see you Online!

WebSynergy and the associated Portal Pack 3.0 continue to add features as part of its partnership with Liferay. Frerk Meyer in a recent blog post talks about the addition of Groovy support in Portal Pack, which allows one to write JSR 286 portlets in Groovy and deploy to WebSynergy. Satya provides More detail about Portal Pack 3.0 and its multiple language support for portlet authoring.

WebSynergy already supports Ruby and PHP. Stay tuned for more support as newer community and stable builds of WebSynergy [download] and Portal Pack [download] are released.

Glenn has converted GroovyBlogs to a "(largely) message driven architecture" running on Grails on top of GlassFish Server using OpenMQ. Like in the Recent Note on GridDynamics, Glenn started using ActiveMQ and switched to OpenMQ for better stability. He used OpenMQ with HermesJMS for monitoring and with the JMS Plugin for Grails integration.

Check out the details in Glen's note; or check out the NetCraft Report on GroovyBlogs. Additional entries are tagged OpenMQ

This is not just YAPS (Yet Another Pet Store); this one is Groovy! :-) Carol has written a sample of the now famous Pet Store (check out the Wikipedia Entry) but this time it uses Groovy, Grails, MySQL Server and the GlassFish Server. Carol's writeup has full details. Other TA entries on the topic are tagged Groovy or Grails, including the announcement about Grails in the UpdateCenter.

The first Milestone of NetBeans 6.5 is now Available for Download. This release includes support for Groovy, Ruby, Spring, Hibernate, JPA and more, and GlassFish v3. Check New and Noteworthy for full details, but, arguably one of the most important additions is PHP support. See Overview Screencast, Documentation and the NetBeans/PHP Blog.

With all the turmoil around JavaOne I missed the two Grails plugins from Martin. Today I was testing the UpdateTool, saw them, and poked around to find the announcements. Read Martin's notes on the Plugin for v2 and the Plugin for v3. Fire DIR/updatecenter/bin/updatetool (GFv2) or DIR/updatetool/bin/updatetool (GFv3), and install it out.

More GlassFish v3 news: Vivek is using the Embeddable GFv3 that Kohsuke had been working to Embed GFv3 with Grails. I guess this is not really a pre-announcement because it was not planned; people are just playing around doing demos for CommunityOne... -) So come to CommunityOne to check it out. Added: Also see Kohsuke's Note.

CommunityOne is free but space is limited; register now!

JSF can now enjoy the save+reload paradigm (no redeployment) when using Mojarra and Groovy. You may remember Mojarra as the new name for the JSF (reference) implementation integrated into GlassFish. Groovy on the other side probably doesn't need that much introduction.

In a recent blog, Ryan Lubke explains how a recent version of Mojarra can be configured to let you write pretty much any JSF artifact in groovy and thus benefit fully from dynamic reloading. If you add Facelets and NetBeans to the mix, the developer experience becomes very seamless. Ryan's instructions cover the use of the recently-released Groovy 1.5.5 version.

Read also Jason's blog on that topic.