Groovy 5 is now available as a release candidate, with improvements including a better groovysh Repl, Java compatibility improvements, and additional scripting variations to support JEP-512 compact source files and instance main methods in addition to Groovy's shorter scripts. It also has improved Web Content Creation supporting Jakarta standards.  

Groovy is an optionally typed and dynamic language, with static-typing and static compilation capabilities, for the Java platform. The aim of Groovy is to improve developer productivity because of its concise, familiar and easy to learn syntax. The developers say it integrates smoothly with any Java program, and delivers powerful features including scripting capabilities, Domain-Specific Language authoring, runtime and compile-time meta-programming and functional programming.

The additional scripting variations are targeted for JDK25, which  introduced a new main method signature and compact source notation for Java classes. Groovy 5 supports this new notation, as well as Groovy's traditional scripts, and an alternative abbreviated form.

There's also better web content creation support, including Jakarta EE support. The groovy-servlet module supports writing servlets as Groovy scripts (Groovlets), or as Groovy classes. You can also write Template-style, JSP-like Groovy Server Pages which combine (typically) HTML with Groovy control-logic within special tags. Groovy 5 defaults to Jakarta EE versions of the Servlet-related standards. This mostly involves using versions of the underlying classes with different package names.

The type checking has also been improved. Groovy's type checking is extensible, meaning you can weaken or strengthen type checking. In Groovy 5, the developers have added a type checker for format strings. Errors in such strings are often not detected until runtime, but now you can check them at compile time. It adds to the existing regex checking capabilities. There's also a new optional type checker for format strings.

 The groovysh command-line repl has been migrated to JLine3 and has many improvements. Repl offers tab completions for identifiers, variables, packages, methods and meta methods;  auto suggestion: display method signatures and syntax errors on status bar and highlight errors on command line. 

Other improvements include support for infinite iterator generation, and index variables in loops.

Groovy 5 is available as a release candidate now. 

More Information

Groovy Website

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