Slightly modified from original posthttp://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 ratpackgrooscript, 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.

UpdateGroovy Moving to a Foundation

Views: 146

Comment

You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!

Join Codetown

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

Comment by Adam Davis on March 1, 2015 at 9:56am

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.

When you create a profile for yourself you get a personal page automatically. That's where you can be creative and do your own thing. People who want to get to know you will click on your name or picture and…
Continue

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.

 

Enjoy the site? Support Codetown with your donation.



InfoQ Reading List

Presentation: Product Thinking for Cloud Native Engineers

Stéphane Di Cesare and Cat Morris share how engineers can move from being a "cost center" to a value driver using product discovery. They explain the "Double Diamond" framework and why identifying user problems must precede building solutions. Learn to choose the right metrics, build customer empathy through shadowing, and use business context to maximize the impact of your technical work.

By Cat Morris, Stéphane Di Cesare

Cloudflare and Stripe Let AI Agents Create Accounts, Buy Domains, and Deploy to Production

Cloudflare and Stripe launched a protocol that lets AI agents autonomously create cloud accounts, register domains, start subscriptions, and deploy to production. Stripe handles identity and payment with a $100/month default cap. No other major cloud provider offers comparable agent-driven account provisioning.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Navigation API Reaches Baseline Newly Available as Replacement to the History API

The Navigation API is a new interface for managing client-side navigation in single-page applications, now available in major browsers as of January 2026. It addresses limitations of the prior History API by providing a unified event model and improved history management. Key features include the navigate event, automatic URL updates, and integrated error handling.

By Daniel Curtis

OpenAI Open-Sources Symphony, a SPEC.md for Autonomous Coding Agent Orchestration

OpenAI Symphony is an agent orchestrator that uses project-management tools, like issue trackers, as a control plan to coordinate multiple coding agents. Instead of developers managing interactive coding sessions, Symphony manages "tasks" by assigning each one to a dedicated agent that works autonomously to completion. Once a task is finished, a human is in charge to review the resulting output.

By Sergio De Simone

Neobank Monzo Builds Governed Data Mesh across 100 Teams and 12000 dbt Models

Monzo recently redesigned its data warehouse to support more than 100 teams working on over 12000 dbt models. Introducing a so-called "meshy" approach, Monzo cut warehouse costs by about 40% and improved data delivery speed by 25%.

By Renato Losio

© 2026   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service