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Feeling Groovy at Last


By Andrew Binstock
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February 1, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 2)
After many delays, the Java scripting language Groovy is finally shipping. The 1.0 release became official the first working day of this year, and it promises to bring lots of good things to many a Java developer.

Groovy is a dynamic scripting language that was purpose-built for the Java platform. By this I mean that it is not the port of another idiom (in the Jython, JRuby mold), but a language that was designed for the JVM and specifically for use by Java developers. The goal—which appears to have been met—was to provide a simplified syntax for much of Java’s notoriously wordy code.

Groovy does away with the tediousness via lots of syntactic sugar that makes Java development really a pleasure. For example, when you define a class, Groovy automatically creates default getters and setters for fields. Lists and maps—Java’s most overused collections—are first-class members of the language. You declare and load them with values in a single concise statement akin to Java’s syntax for arrays.

Groovy also offers closures, which are a technique made famous by Ruby. Closures have many definitions, and a rather dull meme in programming language blogs these days is arguing over what constitutes a closure. Putting aside the academics’ sparring, closures are essentially anonymous blocks of code that are easily attached to a statement or function. They make it simple to specify an action without having to define a class and then a method. Instead, the actual code to be executed is stated inside parentheses and attached to another action. For example, a closure called find, let’s say, can be attached to a collection iterator to look for a specific element. The closure contains only the equality statement to test for the desired element. Another one, called each, can be attached to indicate actions that should occur for every element in the collection. This design makes for concise code that is readily understandable.

Groovy offers lots of other convenience features in areas where Java and other traditional languages tend to be weak, such as duck typing and special syntax to simplify common tasks like XML processing.




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