Apache Software Foundation (ASF) project contributors have released version 3.0.0 of Apache Groovy, the dynamic language for the Java platform, saying download numbers topped an impressive 100 million in 2018 for the first time.
The latest release on January 1 will be the last “alpha” release of Groovy 3.0.0 the Apache Groovy team said, saying it includes 138 bug fixes/improvements, helped by the contributions of 30 new participants to the long-running project.
The rise in the open source project’s popularity (first created by James Strachan – now at CloudBees working on Jenkins X – in 2004) comes as developers seek tools that can add flexibility to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
See also: GitHub <3 Kotlin
Apache Groovy is an object-oriented dynamic programming language for JVM; it is a Java-like syntax, but with the ease of more malleable languages like Python and Ruby. It has spawned a popular array of projects around it like Grails, spanning web frameworks, desktop application framework, concurrency, testing, and more.
100 million downloads? Very Groovy
As a testing-oriented development language, it also allows users to run tests in integrated development environments (IDEs), Ant or Maven – all application programming tools in Java.
It is one of several increasingly popular syntaxes that provides complementary value to Java: itself found widely in everything from servers to smartphones.
See also: Is It Time for Cloud Native Open Source?
The release comes as the ASF said in its wrap of 2018 that it now has 328 active projects (up from 319 in July).
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During the last 12 months, 3,208 Apache Committers changed 78,493,228 lines of code over 201,220 commits, with 4,638 new code contributors joining the fray.
There are nearly 200 million lines of code under the ASF’s stewardship, supported by a community of 6,693 active committers.
As Computer Business Review earlier reported, the foundation receives web requests from every internet-connected country on the planet, getting 35 million page views per week across apache.org.
It supports hundreds of enterprise-grade projects that continue to serve as the backbone for some of the most widely used applications in computing today
Read this: Apache Software Foundation: myNewt Flourishing, Check; Cloud Migration, Check; Audit Passed; Check; Five-Year Plan? Check…
