We bring you the usual news from the Groovy ecosystem plus we have an interview with two ladies behind the GR8 Ladies and GR8 Workshops initiatives.

Show notes * To get involved with GR8 Ladies, just head to their landing page - it has links to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and GitHub * Grails 2.4 released + Grails Maven plugin has better multi-project support and supports different versions of Grails + Grails 3 will be based on Spring Boot and Gradle * Learn about the dangers of a super fast JSON parser * Netflix are re-architecting Asgard using Spring Boot micro services * Grooscript (the Groovy -> Javascript tool) reaches version 0.5 * The Grails mailing lists are now closed - use StackOverflow for questions on how to use Grails and the new Google Group for discussions * As Vagrant now supports Windows guest VMs, it's good to know you can get hold of free, time-limited ones from Microsoft * Spring One 2GX preliminary schedule is up * GR8 Conf EU is next week, 2-4 June * Gradle Summit: 12-13 June * GR8Conf US: 28-29 July