Codetown ::: a software developer's community
What is Groovy and why should I care?
Hello again, it's me, Adam. Earlier this year, I finished my self-published book, Learning Groovy, which is about, well, learning Groovy. It also covers the top Groovy-based tools and frameworks, Gradle, Grails, Spock, and Ratpack.
I've enjoyed using Leanpub as a place to work on my books (What's new in Java 8 and others). It is really easy and developer friendly. It uses a Dropbox folder and you can write your book in Markdown (which I did). I've enjoyed a fairly constant trickle of purchases, but I was frustrated that I never had enough time to devote to the other huge part of self-publishing: marketing. To be really successful with a book, it needs to be marketed really well. You need to put in a lot of time and money. So, when it came to publishing "Learning Groovy," I approached several publishers to do the marketing for me.
Luckily, one of them accepted, and I'm currently in the process of final edits (publisher shall remain anonymous for now).
This means that you can only get the self-published version of "Learning Groovy" for a limited time. Once it goes to the publisher, I have to take down all my versions per the contract.
"What is Groovy and why should I care?" you ask? First of all, what rock have you been living under? Secondly, Groovy is a mature and flexible open-source language that runs on the JVM. Want to learn more about functional programming, want optional dynamic typing, easy restful services, easy reactive web applications (Ratpack)? Maybe you to learn about the most popular build framework and testing frameworks for Java (Gradle and Spock)? Groovy is where it's at.
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

Netflix has detailed a cloud-based system for scaling camera file processing across global film and TV workflows. The pipeline handles ingest, validation, metadata extraction, and media transformation at scale using FilmLight API and distributed compute. It standardizes workflows across editorial, VFX, and color pipelines, improving consistency and reducing manual handling across productions.
By Leela Kumili
Vinay Chella and Akshat Goel discuss the challenges of running traditional CDC across heterogeneous databases during peak order traffic. They explain how Debezium hit limits under high load and share how they built Write-Ahead Intent Log (WAIL) - a custom architecture that utilizes a dumb producer proxy and a smart consumer pattern to cleanly separate the intent from the state payload.
By Vinay Chella, Akshat Goel
How we decide is at the core of architecture, and the architecture advice process is a way to decentralize architectural decisions. It needs to be supported by Architecture Decision Records because of the speed at which technology and systems move, and can be complemented by a weekly architecture advice forum.
By Ben Linders
Ky 2.0 is an open-source JavaScript HTTP client built on the Fetch API, featuring significant updates such as consolidated hook handling, enhanced timeout management, and improved URL processing. The release includes response validation through schema validation libraries and addresses migration from earlier versions. It aims to provide a lightweight alternative to axios.
By Daniel Curtis
VS Code 1.123 adds a two-hour delay before auto-updating extensions to newly published versions, creating a revocation window against supply chain attacks. The delay does not apply to trusted publishers like Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI. Similar cooldown mechanisms have now spread across pip, RubyGems, npm, pnpm, Yarn, and Bun.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown