Feeling groovy
April 17, 2007
I attneded the local java group last night to hear Scott Davis speak about Groovy. My colleague Grahame came along as well. Scott did a great job of going in to enough detail to show the power of Groovy, without going overboard. I recorded the event on audio, and may put that up either here or a section of it on my web development podcast.
In a nutshell, likely my next sphere of experimentation will be in Groovy. This is partially due to Grahame’s raving about it, but also because of the power it seems to provide. While it’s not overly similar to PHP, which is what most of my experience has been in, it does away with a lot of the overhead Java requires or fashion dictates. No getter/setter writing - the system will do some runtime reflection to try to get you what property you’re looking for.
There’s no need to declare constructors, public/private/protected attributes, and many other things that Java has required. It’s not that you don’t need them, but Groovy will assume certain defaults and default behaviour, which greatly reduces the amount of repetitive stuff you’ve been required to write (or generate) in Java. It strikes me as a ‘dynamic’ Java in that respect. While under the hood I know it’s not really, it does give enough utility to make it exciting to work with. At least, Scott’s excitement rubbed off a bit last night anyway!
Has anyone out there made the leap from PHP to Groovy? Given the dynamic feel of both, it seems that it would certainly make an interesting article, series or even book if it’s not already being planned.
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April 26th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
[...] supplement my PHP experience, I’ve begun digging in to Groovy recently. I won’t repeat all of that post here, but it’s enough like PHP that the [...]