Interview: Guillaume Laforge on Groovy and DSLs

Posted by Ryan Slobojan on Dec 06, 2007

Sections

Development,

Architecture & Design

Topics

Domain Specific Languages ,

Java ,

Dynamic Languages ,

Ruby

Tags

Groovy ,

JRuby ,

Grails ,

Ruby on Rails

Groovy project manager Guillaume Laforge discusses the history of Groovy, it's relationship to Java, where Groovy fits into Java development, how Groovy compares to Ruby, how Groovy enables domain-specific languages, and what future Groovy development will focus on.

Watch Guillaume Laforge on Groovy and DSLs (17 minutes).

From the interview:

I think the biggest issue at the moment which can slow adoption is regarding tooling support and especially IDE support, because when you are a Java developer you are so used to hit ctrl-space and that's code completion, I don't have to look for the Javadoc or the documentation of my APIs. One of the important aspects that we are going to work on in 2007 is tooling support, and we have got a pretty big team of guys working on the Eclipse plugin and within the following weeks or months you should to be able to have code completion in the Eclipse plugin so it is going to be much easier to write Groovy code in Eclipse.

And I have also been contacted by the JetBrains guys, because they want to add Groovy support in the IntelliJ IDE. As you know they are quite good at making awesome support for languages like JavaScript or Ruby, and I am sure they can do pretty amazing things for Groovy like code completion of course, but even refactoring. So you will have very good support in your IDE, you can mix and match Java and Groovy and have refactoring work, because they have to work. It's really something we have to focus on during this year, and it's taking shape quite nicely and before the end of the year we should have some good tooling support. That's really the main aspect that we need to work on.

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