Grok Programming

I think Groovy - as a language - has potential to ease the development effort in a typical JEE development environment. There have been a ton of web pages about why Groovy is cool and I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader to follow up on. Before we get to the meat of this post I just want to be very clear that I’m a Groovy fan.

The core Groovy developers and the G2One folks are passionate, clever, and guide the growth of the language in a positive way. I have been a long time follower of the Groovy developer and user mailing list and the Groovy developers are on both lists are out there every day helping out and answering questions (often the same ones over and over and over….). These folks are very accessible to the Groovy users. I want to be clear that I’m a huge fan of all the people dedicating their time to the growth of Groovy.

But….

Continue reading ‘Groovy: Its the development environment, stupid!’ »

eWeek has an interesting article on Groovy’s rise in the ranks of programming languages.

“Groovy now ranks 31 on the list of top programming languages, according to Davis and data from the TIOBE Software BV. Groovy had cracked the top 100 six months ago, moving from 103 to 52, and jumped to its current position in a January poll.“

It is fantastic to see Groovy getting some real positive attention I can only hope that will spur people to more work on the Groovy Eclipse plugin.

Martin Fowler on his bliki (part blog, part wiki) has a new entry about the ongoing debate about using Groovy or JRuby on the Java VM. I really don’t have a problem with anything he wrote there. I agree that both languages are interesting and worth developers getting to know and that Ruby probably has the edge on where things are going in the future. But one of the largest driving factors as to why a development team might choose either Groovy or JRuby wasn’t covered at all. So with apologies to both Martin Fowler and Ronald Reagan (not that I think he’s particularly upset with my hijacking of one of his more famous lines) I’d like to make my small addition.

Continue reading ‘Mr. Fowler, back up this train!’ »