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Groovy’s Growth Spurt

  Submitted by anonymous General Development 8 Comments

Groovy took a gigantic leap this past April, with the formal release of a new parser aimed at standardizing the language as part of the JSR process. If you weren’t paying attention before, now’s the time to start. The new syntax is chock full of enhancements to the language designed for a short learning curve and a big payoff. Resident Groovy practitioner Andrew Glover walks through most important changes to Groovy’s syntax and shows you a handy feature you won’t find in classic Groovy.

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Thom Holwerda

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8 Comments

  1. 2005-07-20 6:58 pm
    smitty_one_each

    for JVM-based scripting languages.

    In the Serious Non-Troll Question Department, does such activity indicate

    [] increased interest in JVM-based solutions

    [] fragmentation of the Java world

    [] a breadth vs. depth approach, where an army of small languages strive to avoid being caught in a net…

  2. 2005-07-20 7:08 pm
    Lumbergh

    Groovy and Boo seem to address the same issues for the two platforms – an agile language that is specifically geared towards a particular framework.

  3. 2005-07-20 7:27 pm
    Anonymous

    Acronym overload again.

    JSR = jump sub routine…

  4. 2005-07-20 7:31 pm
    Anonymous

    Unfortunately for Java folks, natively-compiled dynamic languages such as various Common Lisp implementations (SBCL, Allegro) run much, much faster than JVM-hosted dynamic languages. Also, the JVM lacks many dynamic features that are necessary for full implementations for languages such as Smalltalk. So you won’t see “real” dynamic languages on the JVM, just slow scripting toys like Groovy.

  5. 2005-07-20 8:28 pm
    doug

    In case it gets slashdotted ;)

    “Our apologies…

    The IBM developerWorks Web site is currently under maintenance.

    Please try again later.

    Thank you.”

  6. 2005-07-21 2:53 am
    ahmetaa

    Actually, Groovy produces byte code. So, it might be almost as fast as Java in cases.

    • 2005-07-21 11:00 am
      Anonymous

      The fact that it produces byte code does not have to make it fast. Just think: compiled Java code might only take a couple byte code instructions to read a variable, while Groovy code might have to use a long byte code subroutine in order to find out what type the variable is, what operations are possible, etc.