The Groovy development team and SpringSource are very pleased to announce the final release of Groovy 1.7, the most popular and successful dynamic language for the JVM! After two betas and two release candidates, we're are happy to deliver this new and very important milestone to our ever-growing user base.

Over the years, the Groovy project has managed to grow a community, but not only that, a very rich and active ecosystem of Groovy-related projects: the Grails web stack, the Griffon swing application framework, the Gant and Gradle build solutions, the Gaelyk lightweight toolkit for Google App Engine, the Gpars parallel system, the Spock testing frameworks and the GMock mocking library, the CodeNarc and GMetrics quality tools, and many more! With all these initiatives, the world is even groovier and we're thankful these projects have helped us shape what Groovy is today.

Groovy 1.7 provides the following new major features and enhancements:

• Anonymous Inner Classes and Nested Classes, for more Java-friendliness
• Annotation enhancements, with the ability to put annotations on imports, packages and variable declarations)
• Grape enhancement (the Groovy module system)
• Power Asserts, for more readable and expressive assertions
• AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) enhancements with the AST Viewer and AST Builder, for easing the creation of AST transformations
• Various dependency upgrades (including the ASM bytecode library to get ready for the JSR-292 InvokeDynamic bytecode instructions)
• A rewrite of the GroovyScriptEngine for more flexibility and rapidity
• Several GroovyConsole enhancements, like line numbers, a new output view, and more
• Various SQL improvements, like batch updates and transaction support
• and many more enhancements!

For further details, you can have a look at our JIRA release notes for some more details.

You can download Groovy in the download section of our website.

The Groovy development team would particularly like to thank all the users, contributors and committers who helped us all along to improve the quality and usefulness of the language and its APIs, as well as all those projects in the Groovy ecosystem who influenced us and inspired us.

We're offering our community this new release as a Christmas present, hoping you'll enjoy it as much as we did when working on it, and we wish you all a very Groovy Christmas, and all the best for the coming year! It's time to drink some eggnog near the fireplace, or even some champagne to celebrate the release, near the Christmas tree!

Enjoy this new release, and stay tuned for all the upcoming improvements we'll bring you in the future: a more modular and even faster Groovy, additional abilities for more readable and expressive DSLs, and many more exciting features!