Groovy-beta-8 is released

Dear users, dear developers,

I'm proud and happy to announce the release of Groovy 1.0 beta 8!
We've put a lot of energy to improve the stability and the user
experience. I hope you will like it!

A lot of issues were fixed, among the most important and interesting ones:

- groovyConsole and the streaming builders are back in the distribution
- lighter error messages in groovysh (no more huge stacktraces)
- a better experience with JDK 5.0
- no more memory leaks when evaluating thousands of scripts with GroovyShell
- MarkupBuilder can now generate <a href="groovy">stuff</a>
- on certain windows platform, the classpath flag was not working
- possibility to use a groovy namespace in ant build files without
defining a taskdef for the groovyc ant task

I want to thank all the great guys who helped me make this release!
Particularly, let me thank:
- Jochen Theodorou for Spring cleaning a lot of JIRA issues with me,
- Russel Winder for his efforts in making Groovy build and run on JDK 1.5,
- Dierk Koenig for his work on the Ant builder,
- Sam Pullara for the lighter error messages in the Groovy shell,
and all the others who contributed with their help and support whether
in code or patches, (Jeremy Rayner, Scott Stirling, Steven Devijver,
Marc Hedlund, Gary Furash, Kim Pilho, etc)

You can download the binary or source distributions there:
http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/

NB: depending on your platform, you may have to chmod +x the shell scripts.

Enjoy!

Guillaume Laforge
and the Groovy Team

PS : here are the precise release notes from JIRA