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: 134

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

Uber Adopts Amazon OpenSearch for Semantic Search to Better Capture User Intent

To improve search and recommendation user experiences, Uber migrated from Apache Lucene to Amazon OpenSearch to support large-scale vector search and better capture search intent. This transition introduced several infrastructure challenges, which Uber engineers addressed with targeted solutions.

By Sergio De Simone

Benchmarking Beyond the Application Layer: How Uber Evaluates Infrastructure Changes and Cloud Skus

Uber’s Ceilometer framework automates infrastructure performance benchmarking beyond applications. It standardizes testing across servers, workloads, and cloud SKUs, helping teams validate changes, identify regressions, and optimize resources. Future plans include AI integration, anomaly detection, and continuous validation.

By Leela Kumili

Presentation: Changing Power Dynamics: What Senior Engineers Can Learn From Junior Engineers

Beth Anderson discusses the "power distance index" and its critical role in communication. Using the Korean Air Flight 801 tragedy as a case study, she explains the dangers of hierarchy-driven silence. She shares actionable frameworks for building the 4 stages of psychological safety, implementing reverse mentoring, and using PRs as tools for knowledge sharing rather than gatekeeping.

By Beth Anderson

Podcast: Effective Mentorship and Remote Team Culture with Gilad Shoham

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Gilad Shoham about building effective mentorship relationships, leading fully distributed teams and the evolving role of developers in an AI-augmented future.

By Gilad Shoham

Beyond Win Rates: How Spotify Quantifies Learning in Product Experiments

Spotify has introduced the Experiments with Learning (EwL) metric on top of its Confidence experimentation platform to measure how many tests deliver decision-ready insights, not just how many “win.” EwL captures both the quantity and quality of learning across product teams, helping them make faster, smarter product decisions at scale. The outcome must support one action: ship, abort, or iterate.

By Olimpiu Pop

© 2025   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service