Getting Groovy with Java
I really had no business delving into Groovy until I had recently attended a Groovy presentation at a local JUG meeting (thanks Jeff Brown). Sorry–I am a bit late to the coming-out party so excuse me if all this seems old news. But I came out of the presentation really impressed with the current state of Groovy. I was so impressed that I had quickly downloaded JetGroovy plug-in and began doing some simple and fun experimentation of the “differentiating” features in Groovy mixed with Java code! The soon-to-be-released IDEA7 supports Groovy/Grails, and from my VERY limited experience it does a pretty good job with the usual refactoring and smart capabilities that you have come to expect from IDEA. I love how Java and Groovy can interoperate with each other so seamlessly and effortlessly. It wasn’t always this easy in the past as I understood it; however, the soon-to-be-released Groovy 1.1 will address the ‘chicken-and-egg’ compilation-and-linking issue that made it difficult (but not impossible) to build mixed Groovy and Java projects. I’m excited for the Java platform.
On a related note, I am noticing Grails is seemingly gaining in attention, and, possibly even, some traction in the web-application framework space, and I am now beginning to find it intriguing after being exposed to Groovy. Cool stuff. Is there any reason for Java developers to even want to learn Ruby/Rails now?