A few short months after my very first posting to the Groovy Language mailing list, Graeme Rocher changed the name of Groovy on Rails to Grails. It was too late to change Groovy's groovy name as well, but I suspect the Groovy developers will do so by stealth for version 2. As the underwriter of the Groovy Language, I must ensure Groovy's development continues, and do so under its present name.

The Groovy developers recently created the "Gr8 family of technologies" brand, i.e. Groovy / Grails / Griffon / Gant / etc (see http://twitter.com/aalmiray/status/1906155191) in direct response to my blog post at http://gavingrover.blogspot.com/2008/11/groovy-language-family.html. I suspect "Gr8" is also their upcoming name for the dynamic language engine inside Groovy 2.0, to compete with Google's V8 engine inside Chrome JavaScript. Of course, the "Gr8 dynamic language engine" would soon after become an engine for all JVM-based dynamic programming languages, itself a good idea, but the SpringSource developers might then quietly ignore Groovy 2.0 support in favor of other languages running on the Gr8 engine. Like the 5 yr old JSR at http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=241, Groovy 2.0 would become a carcass, its only purpose to prevent anyone else using the brand.

GroovyScript will be a GPL-licensed lexer/parser for the language engine inside the Groovy 2.0 Language. If that engine changes its name, GroovyScript will then be allowed to bundle the engine as part of its distro. See http://gavingrover.blogspot.com for more details on the Groovy Language.