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: 133

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

Olmo 3 Release Provides Full Transparency Into Model Development and Training

The Allen Institute for AI has unveiled Olmo 3, an open-source language model family that empowers developers with full access to the model lifecycle, from training datasets to checkpoints. Featuring reasoning-focused variants and robust tools for post-training modifications, Olmo 3 promotes transparency, experimentation, and community collaboration, driving innovations in AI.

By Robert Krzaczyński

Nexla Launches Express: A Conversational Platform for AI Data Engineering

Nexla recently introduced Express, a conversational data engineering platform designed to dramatically lower the barrier for building data pipelines for AI applications.

By Craig Risi

Cloudflare Global Outage Traced to Internal Database Change

Cloudflare’s recent global outage, linked to a database update, caused widespread disruption and highlighted the risks of single-vendor reliance. While service was restored, the incident sparked discussions on the importance of multi-vendor strategies in tech. Cloudflare's CEO vowed to enhance system resilience, emphasizing that outages can impact even the largest providers.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Grafana Unveils Smarter Logs, an MCP Server, and TraceQL Upgrades in Latest Releases

Grafana Labs has published major updates across two of its core observability products: Grafana 12.3, and Grafana Tempo 2.9. The two releases have distinct improvements in monitoring, logs, and tracing for Grafana users.

By Matt Saunders

Valkey 9.0 Introduces Multi-Database Clustering, Atomic Slot Migration, and Major Performance Gains

The Linux Foundation has announced the general availability of Valkey 9.0, the open-source in-memory storage solution developed as a successor to Redis. The latest major version introduces atomic slot migrations, hash field expiration, and full support for numbered databases in cluster mode, enabling scaling to 2,000 nodes and achieving over 1 billion requests per second.

By Renato Losio

© 2025   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service