James spent the first morning outlining his original vision for Groovy and the direction in which he'd like to take it forward. ( mp3, powerpoint)

Groovy is trying to provide a high level language (like Ruby, Python or Dylan) that maps cleanly to Java bytecode. It needs to works with Java objects, and the root of all the object trees is java.lang.Object. The syntax will be Java friendly, but doesn't have to be backwards compatible. Groovy will sit on top of J2SE

After lunch I walked everyone through the story so far, from the conception of Groovy back in Aug 2003, up till the present day. (powerpoint)

Guillaume then took us through the user feedback we collected, including the main issues of the moment (powerpoint) which appear to be optionals, documentation, visibility, scoping, debugging, class loading, speed and security.

We then dicussed the roadmap for the Groovy JSR, particularly which key deliverables are necessary to reach a community release of Groovy.

Key Deliverables for Groovy JSR Community Release

• Specification
  • A formal grammar (using similar to EBNF)
  • GLS - semantic rules expressed as a diff of the Java Language Specification
  • Limited references to groovy.* interfaces
• Reference Implementation
• Based upon work at groovy.codehaus.org
• Test Compatiblity Kit
  • Test cases following the GLS chapter by chapter
  • A subset of the JCK:Java 'language' tests or similar (e.g. Jacks)