6 ms·

The Groovy project is looking for a new home

130 points by varmais 12y ago

vezzy-fnord 12y ago
And just a couple of hours ago I was thinking "How come I haven't seen any articles on Groovy on the front page in a while?". Seems its hype has been eclipsed by Clojure and Scala.
- adam77 12y ago
  Also, improvements in the Java language are eroding it's raison d'être.
  - thescrewdriver 12y ago
    Even with a big step like Java 8, Java is very very far from being comparable to more modern, expressive languages.
- lisa_henderson 12y ago
  I think the hype around Groovy was at its peak when folks were the most interested in having something like Ruby running on the JVM, and jRuby did not yet seem like a viable option. But even the hype for classic MRI Ruby has been waning, as developers look to do more with concurrency, and they discover dynamic everything-is-mutable languages have limits when it comes to concurrency. See Tony Arcieri's article "2012: The Year Rubyists Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Threads (or: What Multithreaded Ruby Needs to Be Successful)" and where he wrote: "I’m talking about at Dr. Nic’s talk at RubyConf 2011, a little more than a year ago. Dr. Nic had a fairly simple message: when performance matters, build multithreaded programs on JRuby (also: stop using EventMachine). Now granted he was working the company that was subsidizing JRuby development at the time, but I didn’t, and I for one strongly agreed with him. Not many other people in the room did. The talk seemed to be met with a lot of incredulity." So even among Rubyists, there has been growing interest in Ruby beyond the MRI, and if that is happening in the land of Ruby, then the argument for Groovy is that much weaker. At the same time, the growing interest in dealing with concurrency certainly helped increase interest in Scala and Clojure, and furthermore, functional programming in general. If you are a developer who wants to harness the power of concurrency for greater speed, Scala and (especially) Clojure are full of interesting ideas for how to do that. Groovy, meanwhile, feels off-topic.
  - dhemmerling 12y ago
    On the contrary, Ruby and it's community feels off-topic. I also question that functional programming is Groovy's prime feature or use case.
  - cowardlydragon 12y ago
    Again, just because Groovy rhymes with Ruby doesn't mean that is its sole purpose. Ruby doesn't have optional strong typing, which is critical to Groovy's bridging of Java and Ruby. The optional strong typing enables a host of significant advantages, from code readability and assertions to IDE tooling/autocomplete ease... better API design... and many other things.
tree_of_item 12y ago
Doesn't Google depend on them now, due to Gradle being a part of the official Android toolchain? Seems like they should be interested in doing this.
- pron 12y ago
  Netflix use Groovy quite a lot of.
- cowardlydragon 12y ago
  It might be for the best. I heard that the VMWare people are a bit scuzzy and unethical, such as slapping legal threats on authors to take over their github projects. Of course that was from what I thought was a drama queen ex-groovy committer, but now he looks much more sane. Pivotal is trying to push vert.x now, which I think is a node.js for JVM type of thing. Since they never did make an awesome configure-spring-with-groovy conversion, I guess this won't be too painful of a split. Groovy was the #1 JVM language besides Java for quite a while, I think it still is despite Clojure/Scala hype. It was before pivotal took it on, and it probably will be fine. It's feature set is actually fairly stable. It doesn't need to do Java lambdas, since it has its own, so no major Java cross compatibilities to port from Java8.
  - blktiger 12y ago
    I was disappointed that Spring decided to move away from the groovy config option. I thought of all the different configuration options that one looked the most elegant. I really dislike the current "Java" config fad they are going through. It looks like Java, but it's not really Java, it's a DSL for Spring configuration.
- davidgerard 12y ago
  Gradle is heaven for anyone who's ever had to work with Ant in earnest. The programming language is actually a language, not a horrifying accidentally-Turing-complete DSL!
- davidgerard 12y ago
  Gradle is heaven for anyone who's ever had to work with Ant in earnest. The programming language is actually a language, not a horrifying accidentally-Turing-complete DSL!
revscat 12y ago
Props to what Guillaume has accomplished, but the original raison d'etre for Groovy existing has largely been supplanted by the rise of JRuby and Scala. When Groovy was initially developed JRuby was (arguably) not yet mature enough for production, so developers wanting to use Rails under the JVM were basically out of luck. Grails was developed in response to this need. Now that JRuby is more mature (and, as of today, the only one of the two with official sponsorship) the need for Grails is greatly diminished. The only other major development effort that utilizes Groovy is Gradle, and that has been met with mixed levels of enthusiasm. Add to this that Java itself has made some strides with adding functional(-ish) features to the language, and the benefits that Groovy brings to the table are not as pronounced as they once were. And for devs who are wanting something that is more purely functional there is Scala. Given this I'm not particularly surprised to see Pivotal's decision here. Groovy has always struggled for more widespread relevance, and while it is sad to see this happen, it's also far from unreasonable.
- emsy 12y ago
  I really like to know why you were downvoted, because I made the same observations you did and basically came to the same conclusion. I'd add the really bad IDE support. I've met some developers that said the only thing that kept them from leaving Groovy was that Grails and Spock are really great and worth the trouble. Other than that I see Groovy's future more as a glue language and as a language for tools. Which I'd find very unfortunate because I like Groovy's simplicity & flexibility as a JVM language.
  - cowardlydragon 12y ago
    Groovy IDE support is now really good in the groovy on grails tool suite, which is the main thing that I fear will disappear with this decision. Most refactors, pretty good line-by-line debugging, etc. Edit: GGTS is A spring-specific eclipse distribution..
    - rufugee 12y ago
      It's also extremely good in Intellij (at least, in Ultimate...which is what I'm using daily).
derpshmerp 12y ago
Groovy is a very flexible language with an elegant and approachable syntax. It provides fantastic support for concurrency with gpars. It provides the ability to write static or dynamic code. It integrates seamlessly with Java. I feel groovy has created it's own space in the ecosystem, continues to grow and has a bright future.
- laichzeit0 12y ago
  The concurrency support with gpars is a really killer feature. I'd urge everyone to take at least just take a look at it. Extremely easy and made very "natural" with Groovy syntax. Yeah you can do concurrency with about every other language, etc. but this is within a JVM context.
bonsai80 12y ago
Linked site over quota. Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tVxs2fJEi80J:glaforge.appspot.com/article/the-groovy-project-is-looking-for-a-new-home+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tVxs2fJ...
- j_s 12y ago
  Coral cache: http://glaforge.appspot.com.nyud.net/article/the-groovy-project-is-looking-for-a-new-home http://glaforge.appspot.com.nyud.net/article/the-groovy-proj...
  - mdaniel 12y ago
    I almost wish Coral-caching links was the default, given that making the frontpage can be a real bad thing for smaller sites. Also, if the "portless" version doesn't work for anyone, I've experienced that adding :8080 and :8090 can have better luck. I am unaware of the difference between the two ports.
    - fletchowns 12y ago
      Kinda robs people of ad impressions though
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bjfish 12y ago
I know and use both Ruby/Rails and Groovy/Grails and wanted to debunk a myth here: "Interest in Grails/Groovy is diminishing" - I won't comment on trends but there is still a large, active user base and community I won't list the benefits of Ruby/Rails over Groovy/Grails because I will assume the audience here is familiar with Ruby/Rails. Specifically here are some benefits of Groovy over Ruby: - Very good JVM tooling and integration - Familiar (Java) - Developer friendly (Ruby has a number of syntax warts, e.g. elvis operator, null safe operator - just to start) syntax - Optional static compilation - Optional typing and Grails over Rails: - Performance - take a look at techempower benchmarks http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9&hw=peak&test=query - Spring integration - having Spring built in is often useful in an enterprise context where existing Spring use exists - Typing is nice if you like that (Mentioned above) When I need to decide between using Grails and Rails, it usually comes down to developer convenience vs performance. I am asking myself do I want to give up a lot of performance (with Grails) for a little more developer conveniences (with Rails)? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no.
- rufugee 12y ago
  As someone who has done a lot in both frameworks, I have found Grails to be more mature from an enterprise standpoint, and the tooling support is outstanding. IMHO, it's a lot easier to track down what is happening where in Grails as opposed to Rails.
  - Arnor 12y ago
    > IMHO, it's a lot easier to track down what is happening where in Grails as opposed to Rails. Do you have any examples here? I can't think of a time when I've had to hunt long to figure out where things are happening in Rails.
- mbell 12y ago
  I've also used both languages a fair bit, but I've never used Grails (although I've played with it). Couple things to add to the pros/cons: > Developer friendly (Ruby has a number of syntax warts, e.g. elvis operator, null safe operator - just to start) syntax I would love to see the elvis operator and the null safe operator in Ruby, but I'd also like to see blocks in Groovy. An addition to the pros of Groovy: Interacts extremely well with existing Java code. While you can call into Java from JRuby, it's no where near as clean to interoperate with Java in the same code base. In the past I've loved Groovy because I could use it very cleanly inside a codebase that had a lot of Java, e.g. use Groovy to write controllers or data munging code but use Java for most other things.
ireadzalot 12y ago
I hope they can find a model like how Django (Python) has its own foundation to support it. With Gradle being defacto build tool for Android ecosystem and companies like Netflix using it, it feels like they would have no problem with finding a new home/raising-fund for future. I have been using Groovy and Grails for less than a year now and love it so far.
mindcrime 12y ago
I really wish we had the money to hire all the Groovy / Grails developers here. I'd do it in a heartbeat. Almost all of our products are built primarily with Groovy + Grails, and I'd hate to see the project(s) lose substantial momentum. OTOH, I expect both projects to remain alive, even without corporate backing, although perhaps not moving quite as quickly (which would still be a loss).
Edmond 12y ago
Love Groovy's static+dynamic typing. I developed HiveMind (www.crudzilla.com) and the IDE backend is written entirely in Groovy primarily because I am a Java developer and could use Groovy without having to learn a new syntax.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  Interesting. Specially that you decided to make use of JSR-223. Good luck for the business.
mentaat 12y ago
Tons of successful open source projects don't have an official corporate backing, so I am not sure why they are on the look out for one.
mikerichards 12y ago
I like Groovy. The language has the ability to made some very, very nice DSLs (almost english-like). But the buzz around Groovy has diminished. There's only so much room for the already crowded JVM ecosystem. It's great to have choice, but there's only X number of developers, X number of companies that can sponsor, X number of users that build a community. I'd like to see a language like Groovy, but with some of the semantics of Clojure, and some optional typing. Maybe it's time for a reboot of the language.
_pmf_ 12y ago
Groovy has one of the nicest approaches to compile time metaprogramming (apart from Lisp, of course). I often wish it had gained more momentum before Clojure and Scala showed up. The Java interoperation is much, much cleaner than in Jython or JRuby due to Groovy being a first class JVM language.
stickfigure 12y ago
Understanding this decision requires understanding Pivotal more broadly. EMC (which owns VMWare, which owned Spring) bought Pivotal Labs (primarily a Ruby consultancy) and used the brand for a new spinoff company (Pivotal Software, Inc). That spinoff company received as its founding endowment a hodge-podge of enterprise software technologies they had acquired over the years - Spring, RabbitMQ, CloudFoundry, Greenplum - and the consultancy, which is still called Pivotal Labs. For the most part they put the Ruby consultancy people in charge. Even though Pivotal Software is an amalgam, Pivotal received most of its culture from Pivotal Labs. To the extent that you can anthropomorphize a corporation, it really, really likes Ruby. Because of CF, it's warming up to Go fast. Spring is too big and important to neglect. But it's hard to see how Groovy/Grails fit into the big picture. It's not in vogue with the top decisionmakers and it's not critical to the business - it's just something that tagged along with Spring. I doubt anyone has any idea what to do with it.
- vorg 12y ago
  You'd also need to understand that not all full-time Groovy and Grails developers make equal contributions. Funding the 2 technical workers on Groovy might make sense for a business, but due to ownership problems related to the brand, codebase, support, channels, and what not, disentangling these 2 workers from the whole mess is a legal nightmare. Perhaps there's something similar with Grails, but I don't know much about that one. Pivotal obviously decided simply terminating funding was more profitable than trying to split off a separate business and sell it all to someone else.

130 points by varmais 12y ago

And just a couple of hours ago I was thinking "How come I haven't seen any articles on Groovy on the front page in a while?". Seems its hype has been eclipsed by Clojure and Scala.

adam77 12y ago
Also, improvements in the Java language are eroding it's raison d'être.
- thescrewdriver 12y ago
  Even with a big step like Java 8, Java is very very far from being comparable to more modern, expressive languages.
lisa_henderson 12y ago
I think the hype around Groovy was at its peak when folks were the most interested in having something like Ruby running on the JVM, and jRuby did not yet seem like a viable option. But even the hype for classic MRI Ruby has been waning, as developers look to do more with concurrency, and they discover dynamic everything-is-mutable languages have limits when it comes to concurrency. See Tony Arcieri's article "2012: The Year Rubyists Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Threads (or: What Multithreaded Ruby Needs to Be Successful)" and where he wrote: "I’m talking about at Dr. Nic’s talk at RubyConf 2011, a little more than a year ago. Dr. Nic had a fairly simple message: when performance matters, build multithreaded programs on JRuby (also: stop using EventMachine). Now granted he was working the company that was subsidizing JRuby development at the time, but I didn’t, and I for one strongly agreed with him. Not many other people in the room did. The talk seemed to be met with a lot of incredulity." So even among Rubyists, there has been growing interest in Ruby beyond the MRI, and if that is happening in the land of Ruby, then the argument for Groovy is that much weaker. At the same time, the growing interest in dealing with concurrency certainly helped increase interest in Scala and Clojure, and furthermore, functional programming in general. If you are a developer who wants to harness the power of concurrency for greater speed, Scala and (especially) Clojure are full of interesting ideas for how to do that. Groovy, meanwhile, feels off-topic.
- dhemmerling 12y ago
  On the contrary, Ruby and it's community feels off-topic. I also question that functional programming is Groovy's prime feature or use case.
- cowardlydragon 12y ago
  Again, just because Groovy rhymes with Ruby doesn't mean that is its sole purpose. Ruby doesn't have optional strong typing, which is critical to Groovy's bridging of Java and Ruby. The optional strong typing enables a host of significant advantages, from code readability and assertions to IDE tooling/autocomplete ease... better API design... and many other things.

tree_of_item 12y ago

Doesn't Google depend on them now, due to Gradle being a part of the official Android toolchain? Seems like they should be interested in doing this.

pron 12y ago
Netflix use Groovy quite a lot of.
cowardlydragon 12y ago
It might be for the best. I heard that the VMWare people are a bit scuzzy and unethical, such as slapping legal threats on authors to take over their github projects. Of course that was from what I thought was a drama queen ex-groovy committer, but now he looks much more sane. Pivotal is trying to push vert.x now, which I think is a node.js for JVM type of thing. Since they never did make an awesome configure-spring-with-groovy conversion, I guess this won't be too painful of a split. Groovy was the #1 JVM language besides Java for quite a while, I think it still is despite Clojure/Scala hype. It was before pivotal took it on, and it probably will be fine. It's feature set is actually fairly stable. It doesn't need to do Java lambdas, since it has its own, so no major Java cross compatibilities to port from Java8.
- blktiger 12y ago
  I was disappointed that Spring decided to move away from the groovy config option. I thought of all the different configuration options that one looked the most elegant. I really dislike the current "Java" config fad they are going through. It looks like Java, but it's not really Java, it's a DSL for Spring configuration.
davidgerard 12y ago
Gradle is heaven for anyone who's ever had to work with Ant in earnest. The programming language is actually a language, not a horrifying accidentally-Turing-complete DSL!
davidgerard 12y ago
Gradle is heaven for anyone who's ever had to work with Ant in earnest. The programming language is actually a language, not a horrifying accidentally-Turing-complete DSL!

revscat 12y ago

Props to what Guillaume has accomplished, but the original raison d'etre for Groovy existing has largely been supplanted by the rise of JRuby and Scala. When Groovy was initially developed JRuby was (arguably) not yet mature enough for production, so developers wanting to use Rails under the JVM were basically out of luck. Grails was developed in response to this need. Now that JRuby is more mature (and, as of today, the only one of the two with official sponsorship) the need for Grails is greatly diminished. The only other major development effort that utilizes Groovy is Gradle, and that has been met with mixed levels of enthusiasm. Add to this that Java itself has made some strides with adding functional(-ish) features to the language, and the benefits that Groovy brings to the table are not as pronounced as they once were. And for devs who are wanting something that is more purely functional there is Scala. Given this I'm not particularly surprised to see Pivotal's decision here. Groovy has always struggled for more widespread relevance, and while it is sad to see this happen, it's also far from unreasonable.

emsy 12y ago
I really like to know why you were downvoted, because I made the same observations you did and basically came to the same conclusion. I'd add the really bad IDE support. I've met some developers that said the only thing that kept them from leaving Groovy was that Grails and Spock are really great and worth the trouble. Other than that I see Groovy's future more as a glue language and as a language for tools. Which I'd find very unfortunate because I like Groovy's simplicity & flexibility as a JVM language.
- cowardlydragon 12y ago
  Groovy IDE support is now really good in the groovy on grails tool suite, which is the main thing that I fear will disappear with this decision. Most refactors, pretty good line-by-line debugging, etc. Edit: GGTS is A spring-specific eclipse distribution..
  - rufugee 12y ago
    It's also extremely good in Intellij (at least, in Ultimate...which is what I'm using daily).

derpshmerp 12y ago

Groovy is a very flexible language with an elegant and approachable syntax. It provides fantastic support for concurrency with gpars. It provides the ability to write static or dynamic code. It integrates seamlessly with Java. I feel groovy has created it's own space in the ecosystem, continues to grow and has a bright future.

laichzeit0 12y ago
The concurrency support with gpars is a really killer feature. I'd urge everyone to take at least just take a look at it. Extremely easy and made very "natural" with Groovy syntax. Yeah you can do concurrency with about every other language, etc. but this is within a JVM context.

bonsai80 12y ago

Linked site over quota. Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tVxs2fJEi80J:glaforge.appspot.com/article/the-groovy-project-is-looking-for-a-new-home+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tVxs2fJ...

j_s 12y ago
Coral cache: http://glaforge.appspot.com.nyud.net/article/the-groovy-project-is-looking-for-a-new-home http://glaforge.appspot.com.nyud.net/article/the-groovy-proj...
- mdaniel 12y ago
  I almost wish Coral-caching links was the default, given that making the frontpage can be a real bad thing for smaller sites. Also, if the "portless" version doesn't work for anyone, I've experienced that adding :8080 and :8090 can have better luck. I am unaware of the difference between the two ports.
  - fletchowns 12y ago
    Kinda robs people of ad impressions though

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bjfish 12y ago

I know and use both Ruby/Rails and Groovy/Grails and wanted to debunk a myth here: "Interest in Grails/Groovy is diminishing" - I won't comment on trends but there is still a large, active user base and community I won't list the benefits of Ruby/Rails over Groovy/Grails because I will assume the audience here is familiar with Ruby/Rails. Specifically here are some benefits of Groovy over Ruby: - Very good JVM tooling and integration - Familiar (Java) - Developer friendly (Ruby has a number of syntax warts, e.g. elvis operator, null safe operator - just to start) syntax - Optional static compilation - Optional typing and Grails over Rails: - Performance - take a look at techempower benchmarks http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9&hw=peak&test=query - Spring integration - having Spring built in is often useful in an enterprise context where existing Spring use exists - Typing is nice if you like that (Mentioned above) When I need to decide between using Grails and Rails, it usually comes down to developer convenience vs performance. I am asking myself do I want to give up a lot of performance (with Grails) for a little more developer conveniences (with Rails)? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no.

rufugee 12y ago
As someone who has done a lot in both frameworks, I have found Grails to be more mature from an enterprise standpoint, and the tooling support is outstanding. IMHO, it's a lot easier to track down what is happening where in Grails as opposed to Rails.
- Arnor 12y ago
  > IMHO, it's a lot easier to track down what is happening where in Grails as opposed to Rails. Do you have any examples here? I can't think of a time when I've had to hunt long to figure out where things are happening in Rails.
mbell 12y ago
I've also used both languages a fair bit, but I've never used Grails (although I've played with it). Couple things to add to the pros/cons: > Developer friendly (Ruby has a number of syntax warts, e.g. elvis operator, null safe operator - just to start) syntax I would love to see the elvis operator and the null safe operator in Ruby, but I'd also like to see blocks in Groovy. An addition to the pros of Groovy: Interacts extremely well with existing Java code. While you can call into Java from JRuby, it's no where near as clean to interoperate with Java in the same code base. In the past I've loved Groovy because I could use it very cleanly inside a codebase that had a lot of Java, e.g. use Groovy to write controllers or data munging code but use Java for most other things.

ireadzalot 12y ago

I hope they can find a model like how Django (Python) has its own foundation to support it. With Gradle being defacto build tool for Android ecosystem and companies like Netflix using it, it feels like they would have no problem with finding a new home/raising-fund for future. I have been using Groovy and Grails for less than a year now and love it so far.

mindcrime 12y ago

I really wish we had the money to hire all the Groovy / Grails developers here. I'd do it in a heartbeat. Almost all of our products are built primarily with Groovy + Grails, and I'd hate to see the project(s) lose substantial momentum. OTOH, I expect both projects to remain alive, even without corporate backing, although perhaps not moving quite as quickly (which would still be a loss).

Edmond 12y ago

Love Groovy's static+dynamic typing. I developed HiveMind (www.crudzilla.com) and the IDE backend is written entirely in Groovy primarily because I am a Java developer and could use Groovy without having to learn a new syntax.

pjmlp 12y ago
Interesting. Specially that you decided to make use of JSR-223. Good luck for the business.

mentaat 12y ago

Tons of successful open source projects don't have an official corporate backing, so I am not sure why they are on the look out for one.

mikerichards 12y ago

I like Groovy. The language has the ability to made some very, very nice DSLs (almost english-like). But the buzz around Groovy has diminished. There's only so much room for the already crowded JVM ecosystem. It's great to have choice, but there's only X number of developers, X number of companies that can sponsor, X number of users that build a community. I'd like to see a language like Groovy, but with some of the semantics of Clojure, and some optional typing. Maybe it's time for a reboot of the language.

_pmf_ 12y ago

Groovy has one of the nicest approaches to compile time metaprogramming (apart from Lisp, of course). I often wish it had gained more momentum before Clojure and Scala showed up. The Java interoperation is much, much cleaner than in Jython or JRuby due to Groovy being a first class JVM language.

stickfigure 12y ago

Understanding this decision requires understanding Pivotal more broadly. EMC (which owns VMWare, which owned Spring) bought Pivotal Labs (primarily a Ruby consultancy) and used the brand for a new spinoff company (Pivotal Software, Inc). That spinoff company received as its founding endowment a hodge-podge of enterprise software technologies they had acquired over the years - Spring, RabbitMQ, CloudFoundry, Greenplum - and the consultancy, which is still called Pivotal Labs. For the most part they put the Ruby consultancy people in charge. Even though Pivotal Software is an amalgam, Pivotal received most of its culture from Pivotal Labs. To the extent that you can anthropomorphize a corporation, it really, really likes Ruby. Because of CF, it's warming up to Go fast. Spring is too big and important to neglect. But it's hard to see how Groovy/Grails fit into the big picture. It's not in vogue with the top decisionmakers and it's not critical to the business - it's just something that tagged along with Spring. I doubt anyone has any idea what to do with it.

vorg 12y ago
You'd also need to understand that not all full-time Groovy and Grails developers make equal contributions. Funding the 2 technical workers on Groovy might make sense for a business, but due to ownership problems related to the brand, codebase, support, channels, and what not, disentangling these 2 workers from the whole mess is a legal nightmare. Perhaps there's something similar with Grails, but I don't know much about that one. Pivotal obviously decided simply terminating funding was more profitable than trying to split off a separate business and sell it all to someone else.