Groovy: yet another JVM language
by Kevin Dangoor
In case you still think there’s nothing wrong with Java, take a look at Groovy. It’s not Groovy itself that shows what’s wrong with Java, so much as the fact that people have gone and created yet another JVM-based language. I’ve been using BeanShell a bit over the past few days, and it certainly makes some things easier. From what’s described on their wiki, I do think that Groovy will make things easier still, which is the whole point of such a language.
Personally, I’d like to see the Java language evolve to have a bit more useful syntax. They can keep their cherished static typing, but add convenience syntaxes for dealing with hashes, named method parameters, making it easy to pass methods around, etc. If they’re not going to do that for Java, I’d then really like to see Eclipse support something like BeanShell or Groovy.
It would be nice if the Groovy site mentioned the status of the Groovy language and compiler. BeanShell is quite mature and ready to use in projects. Is Groovy?
No, groovy is hardly usable at this point. We’re still designing the language (via the wiki) and working on the tool-chain. I don’t think it’s worth blogging about yet, and sorta wish we’d stayed in stealth-mode longer, but alas…
We’ve a couple of weeks away from having the first version working – with either static or dynamic bytecode generation so Groovy turns straight into standard Java classes.
Once the core language is done the absolute next thing on the list is clean Eclipse refactoring & editing support. I absolutely need this to be able to write all my unit tests in Groovy & work with Java code at the same time – all refactorings across both need to work.
Though as Bob says, its still early days – the projects only been going a week or so – though we’re making great progress. We already can make some simple Groovy classes…
Thanks for the updates! You guys should add a status message to let everyone know.
It’s great to hear that you’re keen on Eclipse integration, because that’s a necessity for me to want to write my unit tests in it. I’m addicted to the little red/green bar and don’t want to give it up!