5 ms·

Gradle is fantastic and hopefully it helps bring awareness to the under appreciated groovy language.

by babs474 12y ago

ebiester 12y ago
Don't most people in the JVM ecosystem know about groovy by now? I first heard about it when Maven 2 betas were coming out and it was the preferred way to write a plugin.
- babs474 12y ago
  I find awareness of groovy very spotty depending on the crowd you travel in. Enterprisey J2EE people regard it as a new fangled something they don't have time for. More pragmatic, hip to it programmers seem to give more attention to scala, clojure, jruby.
  - DigitalJack 12y ago
    Names do have some importance. Calling your programming language Groovy is like calling it "Sweet Hotness." Nobody wants to explain to their boss that they think they should write something in Sweet Hotness, and likewise Groovy.
    - caoilte 12y ago
      I guess you never had the "We're switching from SVN to git" conversation.
  - mindcrime 12y ago
    I guess I fall somewhere in between then. :-) Our startup is writing "enterprisey" B2B knowledge management software, but almost all of our code is written in Groovy. But I'm "hip to it" enough to at least own several Clojure and Scala books and have both on my "to learn" list. shrug Personally I'm a big fan of Groovy. It gets an awful lot of things right, IMO. The syntax is mostly a superset of plain Java, but a lot of things that are required in Java are optional in Groovy. But Groovy is dynamic and has meta-programming, closures, dynamic typing, etc. For my money, it really hits the sweet spot. Easy to learn for a Java person, but way more productive than Java.
    - babs474 12y ago
      >Easy to learn for a Java person, but way more productive than Java. Agreed, which is why it such a shame it isn't more prevalent. Along with the features you mention, I'll add, good repl support, which is a must for modern languages in my book and is a huge productivity boost.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    > Enterprisey J2EE people regard it as a new fangled something they don't have time for. Back when I was part of a project that was developing a JSF framework on top of RichFaces, I started pushing for Groovy support on our SDK. This was 2009, Groovy was everywhere on JUG talks in Germany, most talking about Grails success stories. On the same year while attending JSF Days in Austria there were some Oracle guys showing how to do JSF applications in Groovy and the possible inclusion the the next J2EE revision. Other team on the same company was replacing the Perl battle tested installation scripts by Groovy ones. Nowadays, if it wasn't for Android Studio and its dependency on Gradle, I would hardly notice its use.
    - narrator 12y ago
      Groovy's problem is that it's very slow compared to Java. http://java.dzone.com/articles/java-7-vs-groovy-21 http://java.dzone.com/articles/java-7-vs-groovy-21
  - smrtinsert 12y ago
    as another "enterprisey" type I vastly prefer clojure or scala. either go full on static typing or full expressivness. groovy is too middle of the road for me.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
laichzeit0 12y ago
I've used Groovy extensively for 4 years or so now. A product we used that ran on JBoss decided to use it as the plugin language to extend / use internal APIs. I really pity Java people who don't know or haven't used Groovy yet. It's like embedding Lua into your C app. Why people still write the bulk of their code in pure Java is beyond me. The other day I learned that Solr supports Groovy as an embedded language to write extensions in. It's amazing.
anonymouslee 12y ago
I certainly appreciate the syntactic sugar of Groovy as a clear improvement over vanilla Java. But with time as a scarce resource I've opted to learn Scala and Clojure instead. It would be great if somehow we could smush Gradle and sbt together to build a best of all possible worlds build system for Scala. Back in 2009, James Strachan (the creator of Groovy) stated that if he'd known about Scala first he probably wouldn't have built Groovy [1]. This Dr. Dobb's article [2] also has some good points on evaluating Groovy and whether or not it will continue to thrive. The simplicity of its syntax vs scala is a great point for Groovy though. [1] - http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement-for.html http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-repl... [2] - http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731 http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731
- btreecat 12y ago
  Thank you for these links! I love programming history and the many things you can learn about your tools. I am stuck on a few projects at work using Groovy/Grails. Groovy itself has been fine and I regularly switch between Groovy, Python and JavaScript with little more than a Google to double check syntax. However dealing with Grails is a damn nightmare. I recently ran into a bug where grails parsed a parameter query variable containing a nbsp symbol. Instead of giving me a string with an nbsp character, it inserted an "A" with an accent mark in addition to the ndbsp character. Two for the price of one! The best part was, this only happened after I compiled the app to a war file so it didn't show up in development. This is the 3rd parsing bug in grails I have found in the last few months alone. Another one was the when using "render as obj as JSON" shortcut for controllers. The parser was converting "</" characters into a single Unicode character. Causing the HTML string I was trying to render break. However doing the conversion to JSON manually in a service class and setting the right response headers then returning the JSON string worked fine. The third one was XML builder. Errors are thrown if I have empty leaf nodes (at a minimum I need to add {} to the end of leaf nodes). Only works in dev however as gain when I build the war it does not work at all. Instead I just build my XML string manually. The final thing I don't care for is the GORM. We have never gotten DB auto reconnect to work with any MSSQL server or DB2 in the last 2 years (that we have been actively trying to get it to work) across 4+ applications. tl;dr Groovy is OK but Grails is a total PITA.
vorg 12y ago
> hopefully [gradle] helps bring awareness to the under appreciated groovy language If Groovy's still under-appreciated after 10 years, there's got to be a reason.
- zmmmmm 12y ago
  You say that with intent to imply it must be a bad reason, it's a little underhand. There are lots of reasons Groovy is not well appreciated. It's name is terrible, the community has always had a somewhat amateurish image (in stark contrast to the actual professionalism of what they do), it's choice to blend in seamlessly with Java and adopt as much Java syntax as possible made it decidedly unsexy with the crowd want to push new language concepts. It got a bad reputation for being slow early on (quite undeserved since it was always about as fast as comparable languages). I think it's actually used incredibly widely but people don't even know it, Gradle being an example, but lots of other similar cases. Groovy just doesn't get credit a lot of the time because it embeds so seamlessly in to the Java world.
- eeperson 12y ago
  I think this due to Groovy's fragmented ecosystem (Groovy's 2 big recognizable projects, Grails and Gradle, don't play well together) combined with the fact that you can't use Groovy everywhere you use Java.

Gradle is fantastic and hopefully it helps bring awareness to the under appreciated groovy language.

by babs474 12y ago

Gradle is fantastic and hopefully it helps bring awareness to the under appreciated groovy language.

Don't most people in the JVM ecosystem know about groovy by now? I first heard about it when Maven 2 betas were coming out and it was the preferred way to write a plugin.

babs474 12y ago
I find awareness of groovy very spotty depending on the crowd you travel in. Enterprisey J2EE people regard it as a new fangled something they don't have time for. More pragmatic, hip to it programmers seem to give more attention to scala, clojure, jruby.
- DigitalJack 12y ago
  Names do have some importance. Calling your programming language Groovy is like calling it "Sweet Hotness." Nobody wants to explain to their boss that they think they should write something in Sweet Hotness, and likewise Groovy.
  - caoilte 12y ago
    I guess you never had the "We're switching from SVN to git" conversation.
- mindcrime 12y ago
  I guess I fall somewhere in between then. :-) Our startup is writing "enterprisey" B2B knowledge management software, but almost all of our code is written in Groovy. But I'm "hip to it" enough to at least own several Clojure and Scala books and have both on my "to learn" list. shrug Personally I'm a big fan of Groovy. It gets an awful lot of things right, IMO. The syntax is mostly a superset of plain Java, but a lot of things that are required in Java are optional in Groovy. But Groovy is dynamic and has meta-programming, closures, dynamic typing, etc. For my money, it really hits the sweet spot. Easy to learn for a Java person, but way more productive than Java.
  - babs474 12y ago
    >Easy to learn for a Java person, but way more productive than Java. Agreed, which is why it such a shame it isn't more prevalent. Along with the features you mention, I'll add, good repl support, which is a must for modern languages in my book and is a huge productivity boost.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  > Enterprisey J2EE people regard it as a new fangled something they don't have time for. Back when I was part of a project that was developing a JSF framework on top of RichFaces, I started pushing for Groovy support on our SDK. This was 2009, Groovy was everywhere on JUG talks in Germany, most talking about Grails success stories. On the same year while attending JSF Days in Austria there were some Oracle guys showing how to do JSF applications in Groovy and the possible inclusion the the next J2EE revision. Other team on the same company was replacing the Perl battle tested installation scripts by Groovy ones. Nowadays, if it wasn't for Android Studio and its dependency on Gradle, I would hardly notice its use.
  - narrator 12y ago
    Groovy's problem is that it's very slow compared to Java. http://java.dzone.com/articles/java-7-vs-groovy-21 http://java.dzone.com/articles/java-7-vs-groovy-21
- smrtinsert 12y ago
  as another "enterprisey" type I vastly prefer clojure or scala. either go full on static typing or full expressivness. groovy is too middle of the road for me.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

laichzeit0 12y ago

I've used Groovy extensively for 4 years or so now. A product we used that ran on JBoss decided to use it as the plugin language to extend / use internal APIs. I really pity Java people who don't know or haven't used Groovy yet. It's like embedding Lua into your C app. Why people still write the bulk of their code in pure Java is beyond me. The other day I learned that Solr supports Groovy as an embedded language to write extensions in. It's amazing.

anonymouslee 12y ago

I certainly appreciate the syntactic sugar of Groovy as a clear improvement over vanilla Java. But with time as a scarce resource I've opted to learn Scala and Clojure instead. It would be great if somehow we could smush Gradle and sbt together to build a best of all possible worlds build system for Scala. Back in 2009, James Strachan (the creator of Groovy) stated that if he'd known about Scala first he probably wouldn't have built Groovy [1]. This Dr. Dobb's article [2] also has some good points on evaluating Groovy and whether or not it will continue to thrive. The simplicity of its syntax vs scala is a great point for Groovy though. [1] - http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement-for.html http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-repl... [2] - http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731 http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731

btreecat 12y ago
Thank you for these links! I love programming history and the many things you can learn about your tools. I am stuck on a few projects at work using Groovy/Grails. Groovy itself has been fine and I regularly switch between Groovy, Python and JavaScript with little more than a Google to double check syntax. However dealing with Grails is a damn nightmare. I recently ran into a bug where grails parsed a parameter query variable containing a nbsp symbol. Instead of giving me a string with an nbsp character, it inserted an "A" with an accent mark in addition to the ndbsp character. Two for the price of one! The best part was, this only happened after I compiled the app to a war file so it didn't show up in development. This is the 3rd parsing bug in grails I have found in the last few months alone. Another one was the when using "render as obj as JSON" shortcut for controllers. The parser was converting "</" characters into a single Unicode character. Causing the HTML string I was trying to render break. However doing the conversion to JSON manually in a service class and setting the right response headers then returning the JSON string worked fine. The third one was XML builder. Errors are thrown if I have empty leaf nodes (at a minimum I need to add {} to the end of leaf nodes). Only works in dev however as gain when I build the war it does not work at all. Instead I just build my XML string manually. The final thing I don't care for is the GORM. We have never gotten DB auto reconnect to work with any MSSQL server or DB2 in the last 2 years (that we have been actively trying to get it to work) across 4+ applications. tl;dr Groovy is OK but Grails is a total PITA.

vorg 12y ago

> hopefully [gradle] helps bring awareness to the under appreciated groovy language If Groovy's still under-appreciated after 10 years, there's got to be a reason.

zmmmmm 12y ago
You say that with intent to imply it must be a bad reason, it's a little underhand. There are lots of reasons Groovy is not well appreciated. It's name is terrible, the community has always had a somewhat amateurish image (in stark contrast to the actual professionalism of what they do), it's choice to blend in seamlessly with Java and adopt as much Java syntax as possible made it decidedly unsexy with the crowd want to push new language concepts. It got a bad reputation for being slow early on (quite undeserved since it was always about as fast as comparable languages). I think it's actually used incredibly widely but people don't even know it, Gradle being an example, but lots of other similar cases. Groovy just doesn't get credit a lot of the time because it embeds so seamlessly in to the Java world.
eeperson 12y ago
I think this due to Groovy's fragmented ecosystem (Groovy's 2 big recognizable projects, Grails and Gradle, don't play well together) combined with the fact that you can't use Groovy everywhere you use Java.