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.

Morgan Stanley engineers Jim Gough and Andreea Niculcea showed how they're retooling the bank's API program for AI agents using MCP and FINOS CALM. Live demos covered compliance guardrails, deployment gates, and zero-downtime rollouts across 100+ APIs. First API deployment shrank from two years to two weeks. They also demoed Google's A2A protocol running alongside MCP.
By Steef-Jan WiggersChristine Lemmer-Webber, Executive Director at the Spritely Institute, and David Thompson, CTO at the Spritely Institute, presented “Spritely: Infrastructure for the Future of the Internet” at QCon London 2026, where they discussed how Spritely works to decentralize the Internet with new foundational technologies that put users in control.
By Michael Redlich
You can find your way through an organization by figuring out what artifacts people leave behind, David Grizzanti mentioned at InfoQ Dev Summit Boston. He compared culture to anthropology, suggested studying behaviors, power dynamics, and decisions first, and then patiently model and reward new norms, build allies, and use influence and leading by example, to shift engineering culture over time.
By Ben Linders
At QCon London 2026, Jeff Smith discussed the growing mismatch between AI coding models and real-world software development. While AI tools are enabling developers to generate code faster than ever, Smith argued that the models themselves are increasingly “stale” because they lack the repository-specific knowledge required to produce production-ready contributions.
By Daniel Dominguez
Claude Opus 4.6 discovered 22 Firefox vulnerabilities in two weeks, including 14 high-severity bugs, as nearly 20% of all critical Firefox vulnerabilities were fixed in 2025. The AI also wrote working exploits for two bugs, demonstrating emerging capabilities that give defenders a temporary advantage but signal an accelerating arms race in cybersecurity.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown