Groovy Goodness

Oh taste and see that the groovy language is good? I suppose so, yes, there is groovy goodness. No not the blog, but some things I’ve learned by delving into it over the past few days.

• Simple ways to include testing by embedding asserts in ones code
  • “Groovy embeds Junit (from Java), so there is no need to set up a new dependency (Groovy in Action, 2nd Edition)”. Also, testing is mandatorily turned on, versus in Java where it is optional. Its really quite nice, it seems more convenient than Ruby’s approach.
    
• A closure that can use it making it more concise than ruby!
  • In ruby 1.9.3p392 :001 > (1..10).each {|x| print x}
  • In groovy groovy:000> (1..10).each {print it}
  • Each produces the result of 12345678910, however one was much more concise
  • In groovy, it is a keyword like in ruby self is a keyword and this is a keyword in javascript

Groovy seems not so much an analogue to other languages like python and ruby, but more so a great way to gain the benefits of ruby and python scripting on top of the Java JVM. Groovy and Java go hand in hand.

Learning groovy seems like its a better way to learn and use Java. And from that perspective, I don’t feel as much as if I’m bound by java’s personality and rules, but rather learning java in all its goodness but with an extra toolbelt called groovy.

JL