Grails 2.3.0 milestone 2 was released with features like new REST APIs and improved unit testing, while Groovy released versions 2.2 and 2.1.6, addressing vulnerabilities and introducing enhancements. The GR8 conference in Minneapolis covered topics on Groovy and Grails, featuring notable speakers discussing code quality and data visualization. Additionally, OpenXava 4.8 was launched as a code generation-free alternative to Grails, ready for production from the start.

1. JULY IN GRAILS
June end-July starting:
Grails 2.3.0 Milestone 2 was released with some of the advanced features to M1:
 New REST APIs, making it easy to build REST APIs in Grails
 Scaffolding plugin that can generate REST controllers and Async controllers
 Enhanced support for Controller namespaces
 Milestone 1 of the Hibernate 4 Support
 A new Testing daemon that speeds up unit testing in Forked Mode
It has been already announced by developers that since this is a Milestone, it will be
refined at some stages. More information about what’s new in Grails 2.3 can be
found on Grails Documentation Guide.
09th July:
Just within 6 months of successive launches of Groovy 1.8.9, 2.0.7, 2.1.1 in February
2013; 2.0.8 and 2.1.3 in April; Groovy 2.1.4 in May and 2.1.5 with Bug fix in June, Groovy
is back with beta version of 2.2 and bug fix release of Groovy 2.1.6. These versions of
Groovy have been fixed with JavaDoc vulnerability. Some of the most highlighted
features of these are: Implicit Closure coercion, @Memoized AST transformation for
methods, New DelegatingScript base class for scripts, @DelegatesTo with generics type
tokens and Precompiled type checking extensions.
Some more enhancements have also been incorporated in these new versions of
groovy:
 Support for code completion in various places, like imports, package names, class
names, variable names, parameter names, keywords, etc.
 a doc command allows you to open the relevant JavaDoc and Groovy GDK web
pages to have more information for a given class, for example try in Groovysh:
doc java.util.List
 you can complete file names inside strings, particularly handy for your scripting
tasks where you want to open a file with new File("data.|”) (where the pipe
character is the position of your cursor), and then hit the TAB key to have the
completion of the file name

2. 21st-23rd July:
GR8 conference was held in Minneapolis, MN discussing topics of Groovy, Grails, Griffon
and other technologies. Speakers like Dr.Venkat Subramaniam, Jeff Beck, Jonathan
DeJong, Jim Driscoll and Luke Daley discussed topics on improving quality of Groovy
Code, Using Stats Analysis with grails, Visualizing data with D3, Groovy as an extension
language for Oracle respectively. Gr8Conf has provided entire list of speakers on their
official webpage and their presentations and other details can be downloaded from
Github website.
23rd July:
OpenXava 4.8 has been released as an alternative to Grails for Database development with
Groovy. It has been differentiated with Grails by features:
 It does not use code generation
 It is based in Java Standards (JPA, Portlets, Dependency Injection and Bean
Validation)
 Application is ready for production from first time.
All the new features and fixes can be seen in changelog of OpenXava and can be
downloaded from its download page.