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.

NVIDIA has announced a new family of open models called NVIDIA Ising, designed to address quantum processor calibration and quantum error correction. These are two of the main engineering challenges limiting the scalability of current quantum systems, where noise and instability in qubits reduce the reliability of computations.
By Daniel Dominguez
NestJS has announced a draft pull request for its upcoming v12.0.0 release, scheduled for early Q3 2026. Key changes include a transition from CommonJS to ESM, native Standard Schema support in route decorators, and shifts in testing and linting tools. Vitest will replace Jest, and oxlint will replace ESLint, while Rspack will replace Webpack for bundling.
By Daniel Curtis
Platform engineering has to be approached from a socio-technical perspective, and shaped by all stakeholders, not just developers, Sergiu Petean said in his talk Driving the Future of Insurance through Platform Engineering. Platform success depends on written principles that endure change while embracing change as the main design force, to enable teams to build, run, and release software.
By Ben Linders
Cloudflare announced Agent Memory in private beta, a managed service that extracts structured memories from AI agent conversations and retrieves them on demand using five-channel parallel retrieval with Reciprocal Rank Fusion. Shared memory profiles let teams of agents access common knowledge. Competitors include Mem0, Zep, LangMem, and Letta.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
Meta has already begun preparing for the threats posed by quantum computing and migrating its systems to post-quantum cryptography, a complex process that will take multiple years to complete. In a recent article, Meta researchers outline their strategy and share key lessons learned along the way.
By Sergio De Simone
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown