Groovy is what it says on the tin

I can’t believe I never stumbled across this before; I’ve seen a few posts about Groovy on dzone.com previously and just ignored them. A couple of weeks ago however I bother to investigate this language – how I wish I’d done this earlier!

I recently bought the second edition of Agile Web Development with Rails, which is good and all but when I scour the net to see where Ruby is on the job front, it’s pretty bleak (at least if you don’t live in London).

Back to Groovy though; the first time I stumbled across some of the source I smiled – this is what I’ve been waiting for… I can see how the reduction in syntax could make Java purists turn red faced but from a productivity standpoint, not having to write such overly verbose code that is Java really appeals to me.

It’s made Java fun again, dare I say it, it’s made Java groovy :) (please put down those tomatoes)

I think stumbling across Groovy now is no co-incidence, what with version 1.0 just out the door and numerous books making it to the shelves. Things went from good to great when I Googled around for some Grails tutorials – the amount that can be achieved in such a succinct amount of code was a breath of fresh air.

Working with PHP all day (not exactly a verbose language), Grails looked like a significant improvement in productivity. Perhaps it’s the pedigree of the developers that have forged Groovy and Grails – PHP has always suffered from it’s low barrier to entry – Grails looks well designed and time will confirm this for me.

I’ve ordered Groovy in Action, and PHP in Action just for the hell of it. I saw Marcus Baker, who ran the PHP London user group until Mar 2007, in the authors list and thought this has to be a decent read. I’ve seen him speak nothing but sense on SitePoint’s PHP Application Design forum).

I’m not the only one who’s enthused… hopefully given Groovy’s heritage and the volume of Java programmers that can make an easy switch; commercial acceptance may be faster than that of Ruby, or at least taken more seriously/readily by enterprise.