Cool things you can do with Groovy

Posted by Ian Roughley on May 10, 2007

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Development

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Java ,

Dynamic Languages

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Groovy ,

Java One

With dynamic languages playing a role in JDK 6, the "Cool things you can do with Groovy" session was aimed at show casing the features of the Groovy language that can help make developers more productive. Groovy experts Guillaume Laforge, Dierk Konig, and Guillaume Alleon presented.

An introduction of the standard features (enhanced language features, closures, regular expression support, GString, collection, etc.) was presented, before discussing the more productivity-enhancing features, most notable of which were:

Groovy Builders & GPath: No longer do you need to interact with complex XPath APIs to access data.  With GPath XML documents act as first class objects, allowing you to access data by calling properties.  Using builders, you work in the reverse direction, using objects and braces to create XML files. Along with XML builders there are Swing and ANT builders.

Annotation Support:  With the release of 1.1 later this year, Groovy will be the only dynamic language that supports annotations.  This is an important milestone as it will allow bidirectional data access.  A demonstration using Google Juice and TestNG showed how easy a test case using injected mock data can be developed.

Live Objects: The Groovy shell feature is not only a simple way to explore the language, but can be used to interactively explore the current Java runtime environment.  When embedded into an application, runtime configurations can be explored and modified in real-time, allowing you to check assumptions and test out theories before making permanent changes in the code.

Dynamic Applications: Compiling Groovy into Java class files and then using the static class files in your applications is one option, but there are a couple of other options available to developers.  The most compelling is to use the GroovyClassloader - with this option the Groovy scripts are compiled at runtime as they are requested, allowing source files to be changed and used without restarting the application.

Charles Ditzel has posted the PPT for download with the presentors permission.

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   ppt cannot be opened ..

   by Debasish Ghosh

   The ppt available in the download link cannot be opened by Microsoft Powerpoint.

   Reply

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   Re: ppt cannot be opened ..

   by David Skelly

   Works fine for me.

   Reply

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   Re: ppt cannot be opened ..

   by Debasish Ghosh

   now it works .. one of those Microsoft Office service packs had to be installed ..

   Reply

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   Google presentation

   by Thom Nichols

   Guillaume also did a presentation for Google which is now on Google Video. The sound is a bit messed up, but most of it is there.

   Reply

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   Nice presentation

   by serge boulay

   Great little presentation, I have really high hopes for Groovy & Grails. Thanks for posting this Infoq. I noticed that jDeveloper was not on the list for tooling support for Groovy, for some reason I thought that they had previously stated that they would provide future support for this in there IDE.

   Reply

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   JDeveloper plugin

   by Guillaume Laforge

   Actually, there's a JDeveloper plugin, but it's still embryonic. Hence why we focused more on showing the Eclipse plugin and the Intellij IDEA plugin.

   Reply

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   Grails Book

   by serge boulay

   I also noticed that there’s a Grails book from Addison Wesley? I searched for it on Amazon but can't find it? Is this book out?

   Reply

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   Re: Grails Book

   by Lance Shaw

   The book I have is "The Definitive Guide to Grails" by Apress. I think I got it from Amazon...

   Reply

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   Re: Grails Book

   by Lance Shaw

   teach me to reply before looking at the presentation.... It looks like it isn't in English... I wonder if that is why it doesn't show up.

   Reply

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    got that one

    by serge boulay

    I got the book you mentioned, but another book would be a welcome addition .. hopefully someone will send us the link to the book.

    Reply

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    Re: Grails Book

    by Alex Popescu

    InfoQ is also providing a free downloadable Grails book.
    
    ./alex
    --
    .w( the_mindstorm )p.
    ________________________
    Alexandru Popescu
    Senior Software Eng.
    InfoQ TechLead&CoFounder

    Reply

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