Groovy

Groovy is my favorite programming language since April 2007. In my favourite bookstore I stumbled across the Groovy in Action book. This is a must read. Since 1995, when i learned functional programming i never have been so excited about a new programming language as i am now about Groovy.

Here are the advantages of Groovy from my point of view.

• Groovy is an extension of Java and fully integrated into it. Classes compiled with Groovy can be used and extended by Java and vice versa.
• Groovy runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and inherits its platform independence. Therefore one can use the thousands of Java libraries and frameworks available. Groovy runs also on Java application and web servers.
• Groovy is very comfortable, concise and expressive. It has strong support of data types like lists and maps with a lot of syntactic sugar.
• Groovy is dynamically typed, but it can be used statically typed. This allows the combination of the advantages of dynamical and statical type systems.
• For starters, Groovy can be used like Java. This eases the migration to the new language for a developer.
• There is a standardization process: Java Specification Request (JSR) 241.

Here are some examples that demonstrate the features of Groovy.

• Groovy can use Java libraries, the disk usage tool, for example, uses the JFreeChart library.
• The EMF Builder provides syntactic sugar for the usage of data models from the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF).

• SearchGroovy
• groovy.blogs()