BillDay.com

As co-spec lead James Strachan reported in his blog, JSR 241, “The Groovy Programming Language” has been approved for JCP development. And with a unanimous vote!

What’s Groovy, you might ask? Get the answers from:

• Groovy central, groovy.codehaus.org
• Neil Ellis’ Just Groovy
• Mike Spille’s excellent overview, “Groovy: First Contact“

Interested in joining the expert group? Click here to apply, but don’t worry, even if you aren’t in the EG, James has promised a public mailing list RSN.

My take: With this JSR, Groovy joins PHP on the list of non-Java languages for which Java Platform interfaces/implementations are being officially sorted out. And of course, the unofficial list is much, much longer still. The more choice developers have, the better in my opinion. I can’t wait to read the spec and try out the RI once it’s available!

Following today’s accidental baseball theme: Reuters reports that the San Francisco Giants are WiFi enabling SBC Park. Now I’ll never have a reason to leave!

Under the “way cool” category: Major League Baseball has extended Sun’s contract for MLB.com.

MLB.com is one heavy hitting site. 2003 stats from the press release:

• 35 million page views on opening day of 2003 playoff series
• MLB.com and the 30 individual team sites registered over 4 billion page views in 2003
• Over 650 million visits during 2003

And there’s a bonus note buried down near the bottom of the release:

In celebration of the 2004 season, Sun is offering free “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” ring tones for mobile phones beginning April 5. For more information on the limited offer, visit java.com/mlb.