Discovery: Groovy

Scripting languages, or “toy” languages I’ve heard some say, are quite the rage today (and most likely tomorrow). We’ve (at least in the Java community) been inundated with a deluge of scripting languages, so many that Apache’s BSF was built (Bean Scripting Framework) to help us make sense of all of them.

There’s a relatively new upstart on the block, goes by the name of Groovy. Groovy, completely based on pure java, incorporates enclosures, code as data, completely OO, completely and transparently embeddable has really started to take off. Think of it as the best of the Ruby and Java worlds, mixed up together in a single JVM, running as either a stand-alone system or embedded in an existing application. Its that cool.

Why are scripting languages cool? Think of it this way. Imagine having a mountain of messy dirty “if/else” statements in your code, and that code constantly changes, needs to be re-compiled, re-deployed and on and on. Imagine taking (decoupling) that code from your application, dropping it into a script, and letting the script handle that stuff for you? Pretty cool eh? Yeah, I think so.

Yes, this is short on detail, I would urge those interested to simply download the Groovy distro, takes about 2 minutes to get it up and running and begin to discover why Groovy is just that.