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.

Revenium has announced the general availability of its Tool Registry, a new capability designed to give enterprises a complete, end-to-end view of what their AI agents actually cost.
By Craig Risi
Agoda recently published an observation arguing that while AI coding tools have measurably raised individual developer output, the resulting velocity gains at the project level have been surprisingly modest, because coding was never the real bottleneck. The post claims that the bottleneck has shifted upstream to specification and verification because these areas require human judgment.
By Eran Stiller
At QCon London 2026, Clara Higuera, Responsible AI Program Lead at BBVA, presented how many of the risks associated with AI systems are fundamentally engineering challenges rather than purely governance or policy issues.
By Daniel Dominguez
Nicole Forsgren discusses the "AI Productivity Paradox", explaining why generating code faster often makes deployment bottlenecks more expensive. She shares the DevEx framework to help architects and leaders systematically remove friction. Learn how to use DORA metrics and RICE prioritization to make a data-driven case for platform health.
By Nicole Forsgren
Most SwiftUI educational content focuses on small projects and sample apps that do not explain what it means to adopt it in a 50 million user app developed by a team of 20+ iOS engineers. This article will attempt to fill this gap. and show how to succeed without breaking your team, your app, or your users' trust along the way.
By Jimit Patel
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown