Codetown
Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Hot New Language (Groovy)
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
-
Comment by Jackie Gleason on April 24, 2015 at 9:27am
-
In my world people aren't letting the news worry them too much. No plans to switch back to spring but I do think this highlights one of the weaknesses of Groovy. It is a lot harder to convert a Groovy file into a Java file than the reverse.
-
Comment by Adam Davis on March 5, 2015 at 4:47pm
-
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.
Happy 10th year, JCertif!
Notes
Welcome to Codetown!
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.
Looking for Jobs or Staff?
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.
InfoQ Reading List
Inside Google’s System for Coordinated A/B Testing Across Its Global Service Fleet
Google has shared details of its fleet wide large scale A/B experimentation system designed to standardize experiment assignment, exposure logging, and configuration propagation across distributed services. The approach enables consistent measurement across products, reduces experiment conflicts, and improves reliability of data driven decision making at scale.
By Leela KumiliPresentation: Choosing Your AI Copilot: Maximizing Developer Productivity
Sepehr Khosravi discusses the evolution of developer productivity tools. Evaluating the strengths of tools like Cursor and Claude Code, he explains actionable techniques for senior engineers - including context engineering, custom rules, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations. He shares real-world benchmarks and strategic frameworks for balancing AI adoption with clean code quality.
By Sepehr KhosraviArticle: Two Misconfigurations That Caused Spark OOM Failures on Kubernetes
After migrating Spark pipelines to Azure Kubernetes Service, two infrastructure settings interacted destructively: spark.kubernetes.local.dirs.tmpfs=true backed shuffle spill with RAM instead of disk, and a hard podAffinity rule forced all executors onto one node. Together, they caused repeated OOM kills invisible to standard diagnostics.
By Pranav BhaskerNode.js Moves to One Major Release Per Year, Starting with Node 27
Node.js will change its release schedule starting with version 27 in October 2026, moving from two major releases per year to one. All releases will become Long-Term Support (LTS), removing the distinction between odd and even versions. An Alpha channel for early testing will also be introduced. This decision addresses maintenance challenges and aims to align with user needs.
By Daniel CurtisPresentation: The Human Toll of Incidents & Ways To Mitigate It
Kyle Lexmond explains how to handle the high-pressure environment of severe production outages. He discusses the critical distinction between mitigation and root-cause resolution, sharing personal experiences from harrowing incident rooms. He shares valuable operational strategies on overcoming cognitive overload, establishing blameless cultures, and optimizing systems for faster recovery.
By Kyle Lexmond
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown