Codetown
Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Hot New Language (Groovy)
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
-
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
-
-
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.
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.
InfoQ Reading List
Presentation: The Time is Now: Delight Your Developers with User-Centric Platforms & Practices
Ana Petkovska discusses creating platform teams, establishing the team API, engagement of early adopters, easing adoption and providing a high quality product.
By Ana PetkovskaDeepSeek Open-Sources DeepSeek-V3, a 671B Parameter Mixture of Experts LLM
DeepSeek open-sourced DeepSeek-V3, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLM containing 671B parameters. It was pre-trained on 14.8T tokens using 2.788M GPU hours and outperforms other open-source models on a range of LLM benchmarks, including MMLU, MMLU-Pro, and GPQA.
By Anthony AlfordArticle: A Framework for Building Micro Metrics for LLM System Evaluation
LLM accuracy is a challenging topic to address and is much more multi-dimensional than a simple accuracy score. Denys Linkov introduces a framework for creating micro metrics to evaluate LLM systems, focusing on goal-aligned metrics that improve performance and reliability. By adopting an iterative "crawl, walk, run" methodology, teams can incrementally develop observability.
By Denys LinkovGoogle Releases Experimental AI Reasoning Model
Google has introduced Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, an AI reasoning model available in its AI Studio platform.
By Daniel DominguezGoogle Vertex AI Provides RAG Engine for Large Language Model Grounding
Vertex AI RAG Engine is a managed orchestration service aimed to make it easier to connect large language models (LLMs) to external data sources to be more up-to-date, generate more relevant responses, and hallucinate less.
By Sergio De Simone
© 2025 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown