Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Slightly modified from original post: http://adamldavis.com/
There’s a hot new programming language that I’m excited about. It can be used dynamically or statically-typed, your choice. It supports functional programming constructs, including first-class functions, currying, and more. It has multiple-inheritance, type inference, and meta-programming. It also integrates really well with a battle-tested enterprise-worthy language and best-of-class virtual machine.
This programming language actually isn’t that new. It’s from 2004, but they’ve recently added a lot of new features, such as traits. Oh, did I mention it has a great community and tons of frameworks built on top of it for web-applications, testing, and even full build systems. This language is great for building DSL’s and is very light-weight. Oh, and it can be compiled to JavaScript and it can be used to develop for Android.
As you might have guessed, this language is called “Groovy”. The virtual machine it’s built on is the JVM, the web framework is Grails, the testing framework is spock, and the build system is Gradle.
As you may have heard, Pivotal has dropped its Groovy/Grails support. Although some will take this news as sky-falling bad news, I actually think it’s the opposite. Pivotal only "acquired" the developers behind Groovy and Grails through a “Russian nesting doll” turn of events. In short, SpringSource bought G2One then Pivotal bought SpringSource (and VMWare goes in there somewhere).
There are tons of companies that stand to benefit from Groovy that could take up its funding: Google, Oracle, and Gradleware come to mind.
Groovy has a lot going for it. With projects like ratpack, grooscript, gradle, and others, its future looks bright.
Also: Grails has improved dramatically and will support microservices much better in the next release (3) among other improvements.
Update: Groovy Moving to a Foundation
Comment
Update: Groovy stewardship is moving to the Apache Software Foundation.
Here's a great article by Cédric Champeau (one of the developers behind Groovy) on Groovy's history and who has contributed to it over the years: http://melix.github.io/blog/2015/02/who-is-groovy.html
Clarification: Groovy and Grails are open-source projects. I used the short-hand "acquired" to describe Pivotal's hiring of the developers behind Groovy and Grails. Groovy and Grails development would continue even if no one hires these developers, just at a slower pace.
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.

On October 19th and 20th, AWS experienced an extended outage triggered by a failure in Amazon DynamoDB that affected most services in its most popular region, Northern Virginia. The cloud provider released an analysis of the incident, sparking discussions in the community about redundancy on AWS, moving out of public cloud, and multi-region approaches.
By Renato Losio
Microsoft has strengthened its Sovereign Cloud offering to meet stringent global data-residency and control regulations, particularly in Europe. New capabilities include a commitment to EU Data Boundary, expanded in-country data processing, and enhanced Sovereign Private Cloud features.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
Monzo has redesigned its fraud prevention platform to detect scams in real time, handle growing payment volumes, and deploy new controls rapidly. Explore the bank’s modular control architecture, feature computation pipeline, and observability using BigQuery for accurate, low-latency fraud detection.
By Leela Kumili
Anthropic released sandboxing capabilities for Claude Code and launched a web-based version of the tool that runs in isolated cloud environments. The company introduced these features to address security risks that arise when Claude Code writes, tests, and debugs code with broad access to developer codebases and files.
By Vinod Goje
Google has unveiled Project Suncatcher, a research initiative exploring how solar powered satellite constellations equipped with Tensor Processing Units TPUs could one day enable large scale artificial intelligence computation in space.
By Daniel Dominguez
© 2025 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown