"I detect a disturbance in the (Groovy & Grails) Force"

As you may know by now, Pivotal recently announced that it will be withdrawing funding support for the Groovy and Grails open source projects after March 31st 2015.    For more information, you can listen to Peter Ledbrook's recent podcast with Graeme Rocher and Guillaume Laforge, the project leads for those projects.

When I first heard the news, I felt like I had been "punched in the gut".   While not an overly active member, I have considered myself part of the Groovy and Grails community for the past couple of years.   I started playing around with Groovy in 2009 and have been hooked ever since!  I know I drove folks crazy at my last job talking about all the things we could do with Groovy.

Based on a comment from Graeme in the podcast,  I have created this posting to share what I have done with Groovy and Grails in the past.  And hopefully more to come!

• I started by reading Groovy in Action 
• Then starting reading other Groovy and Grails books  
• I subscribed to the GroovyMag for several years.  
• I have attended our local Groovy and Grails user group meetings
• I haunted Venkat Subramanian and Ken Kousen at the local NoFluffJustStuff conferences, attending all of their Groovy and Grails talks.
• I even sneaked some Groovy code into a project at work after reading Making Java Groovy
• My attempt at adding the Spock testing framework for our testing was unfortunately met with a lot of resistence - which I still can't understand! :-( 
• And this blog was originally created as place for me to share all of my new Groovy and Grails knowledge with others interested in learning.

Groovy & Grails re-kindled my enthusiam for programming and for that, I would like to say "Thank You" to these teams.

The Groovy/Grails community is awesome and hopefully will to grow and prosper.  It is my hope that a large organization steps up and takes over responsibility for both projects.  The core teams for both of these projects are a set of very sharp individuals and should have no problems finding work.   Let's just hope for the sake of the Groovy & Grails community that they get the opportunity to stay together and continue their fine work, because I am guessing some of them probably felt like they got "punched in the gut" too.

Best of luck guys!