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: 129

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

Claude Sonnet 4 Expands to 1 Million Token Context Window

Anthropic has upgraded Claude Sonnet 4 to support a context length of up to 1 million tokens, a fivefold increase over its previous limit. The feature, now in public beta, is accessible through the Anthropic API and Amazon Bedrock, with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI support expected soon.

By Robert Krzaczyński

AWS CCAPI MCP Server: Natural Language Infra

AWS introduces the Cloud Control API (CCAPI) MCP Server, revolutionizing infrastructure management by enabling natural language commands for resource management. This tool boosts developer productivity with automated security checks, IaC template generation, and cost estimation, bridging the gap between intent and cloud deployment. Embrace simplicity and efficiency in cloud operations!

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Presentation: Making AI Agents Work For You (and Your Team)

Hannah Foxwell discusses the design and implementation of AI agent teams, providing a practical example of a multi-agent system for prioritizing vulnerabilities. She argues that instead of using AI for a "20% productivity boost," engineering should use it to automate "toil" and reshape organizational structures, empowering humans to focus on creative, high-value work that drives business growth.

By Hannah Foxwell

Podcast: Finding Your Engineering Bottleneck: The Hierarchy of Engineering Needs

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Myles Henaghan about the open-sourced "Hierarchy of Engineering Needs" - a systematic framework inspired by Maslow's hierarchy that helps engineering leaders identify and prioritize the most impactful constraints limiting their software delivery systems among competing improvement initiatives.

By Myles Henaghan

Article: The Missing Layer in AI Infrastructure: Aggregating Agentic Traffic

In this article, author Eyal Solomon discusses AI Gateways, the outbound proxy servers that intercept and manage AI-agent-initiated traffic in real time to enforce policies and provide central management.

By Eyal Solomon

© 2025   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service