It looks like SpringOne is going to be really exciting this year.

I will be presenting Compass and also be around Nati GigaSpaces session. With Compass, we will see how simply we can add Google like search to any Spring based application. With GigaSpaces, we will be showing off our next version which one of its main feature, Open Spaces, I have been responsible for. Open Spaces is really exciting (the early access will be out very soon), based on Spring, and is going to evolve and simplify the way people do high performance computing or any typical EDA(+DataGrid) applications. Personally I believe that we are doing to EDA/DataGrid what Spring did to parts of J2EE, so come over to our booth/session and take an early peek.

The Compass team is pleased to announce to release of version 1.2 M1. Major features include:

• Support for Lucene 2.1: Compass now supports Lucene 2.1. Main feature enabled by this is lockless commits.
• Better Glasshfish integration: Improved Glassfish JTA integration (thanks to Julian Klappenbach)
• Improved performance: Better performance when Compass stores internal information in the index.
• Omit norms support: Lucene support for omit norms is now easily configured within Compass different mappings.
• Bug Fixes: Several bug fixes and minor improvements as described in the changelog.

Here is a very interesting blog about integration of Compass, JPA and Glassfish.

This is something that I have been thinking about, to Groovy or (J)Ruby. All of us, developers, would like to learn a scripting language. And when I say learn, I mean to be proficient in it.

Currently, in the Java world, we have two main scripting languages, Groovy and JRuby. The questions that we ask ourself is what should we learn. First, let me explain what it means to learn a new language. Learning the syntax is usually the simple task, but it is important to understand that it does not end there. In order to really know how to use the language, we need to know all the different popular frameworks that comes with it, idioms on how to use it, and so on. If we take the Java world as an example, it is not enough to learn Java as a language, developers need to be familiar with Java design patterns, core Java concepts and design patterns, JEE, Spring and many others…

So, to the question presented in this title, what should a developer learn? Should it be Groovy or JRuby? Both have a very active community and very interesting frameworks that come with them - Grails in Groovy and Ruby on Rails in JRuby/ruby.

The question is an open question to the community, and I would love to hear your views on it. The main thing that I currently think about is this: with Groovy, moving from Java to Groovy seems to feel more natural, Groovy grew out of Java, which gives it a big boost in terms of learning curve (Grails feels like that as well). On the other hand, ruby is really picking up, and if someone chooses to learn ruby (and ruby on rails), it can be used both on the Java world using JRuby, and in future possible projects that will use only ruby, basically making anyone learning ruby more sexy in terms of future jobs.

I don’t know the answer, maybe you can help?