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

Architecting for Global Scale: Inside DoorDash’s Unified, Composable Dasher Onboarding Platform

DoorDash has rebuilt its Dasher onboarding into a unified, modular platform to support global expansion. The new architecture uses reusable step modules, a centralized status map, and workflow orchestration to ensure consistent, localized onboarding experiences. This design reduces complexity, supports market-specific variations, and enables faster rollout to new countries.

By Leela Kumili

CNCF Graduates Dragonfly, Marking Major Milestone for Cloud-Native Image Distribution

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced recently that Dragonfly, its open source image and file distribution system, has reached graduated status, the highest maturity level within the CNCF project lifecycle.

By Craig Risi

OpenAI Secures AWS Distribution for Frontier Platform in $110B Multi-Cloud Deal

OpenAI's $110B funding includes AWS as the exclusive third-party distributor for the Frontier agent platform, introducing an architectural split: Azure retains stateless API exclusivity; AWS gains stateful runtime environments via Bedrock. Deal expands the existing $38B AWS agreement by $100B and commits 2GW of Trainium capacity.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Presentation: So You’ve Decided To Do a Technical Migration

Sophie Koonin discusses the realities of large-scale technical migrations, using Monzo’s shift to TypeScript as a roadmap. She explains how to handle "bends in the road," from documentation and tooling to setting measurable milestones. Sophie shares vital lessons on balancing technical debt with feature work and provides a framework for deciding if a migration is truly worth the effort.

By Sophie Koonin

Article: Read-Copy-Update (RCU): The Secret to Lock-Free Performance

Innovative software engineer with expertise in optimizing concurrency through advanced techniques like Read-Copy-Update (RCU). Proven track record of boosting read performance by over 110% in read-heavy workloads. Skilled in leveraging RCU principles across production systems, enhancing architecture efficiency, and streamlining data handling to maximize scalability and minimize overhead.

By Ramesh Sinha

© 2026   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service