What’s new in Groovy 2.0?

http://www.infoq.com/articles/new-groovy-20

by riffraff • 14 years ago

44 49 14 years ago

infoq.com

_gfrc• 14 years ago

Key highlights as stated by Guillaume:

- a static type checker to let the compiler tell you about the correctness of your code,

- static compilation for the performance of the critical parts of your application,

- modularity, splitting the Groovy JAR into smaller feature-oriented JARs and letting you create your own extension modules,

- JDK 7 Project Coin syntax enhancements, so that Groovy is still as friendly as possible with its Java cousin,

- and JDK 7 Invoke Dynamic integration to benefit from the support of the JVM for dynamic languages.

jbarmash4• 14 years ago

Exciting. As a long-time Groovy / Grails user, can't wait to dig in. I think the new static features make more people coming in from static languages more comfortable getting into the language. .

zmmmmm5• 14 years ago

Groovy is really quite a remarkable language.

The static compilation and type checking features are quite stunning, and if they really work as advertised will truly put to rest the last remnants of my interest in Scala.

I would love to see some more direct support for doing a pure functional style of programming, but what is there is close enough and so much easier to grok than Scala, to be honest.

vorg7• 14 years ago

Clojure is really quite a remarkable language.

The macros and concurrency features are quite stunning, and if they really work as advertised will truly put to rest the last remnants of my interest in Groovy.

I would love to see some more direct support for doing a pure functional style of programming, but what is there is close enough and so much easier to grok than Haskell, to be honest.

zmmmmm5• 14 years ago

I really don't disagree with anything you've said :-)

However a big point of difference is that Groovy's syntax, being 90% compatible with Java, is orders of magnitude more accessible than Clojure to the vast majority of developers.

sarbogast• 14 years ago

Yet another step towards massive adoption of Groovy as an alternative to Ruby and JS for startups. I can't wait to try this out with Vert.x and hopefully get away with never doing JS on the server.

mgkimsal• 14 years ago

I'd heard that groovy 2 would be respecting public/protected/private, as they could be bypassed with metaclass programming in groovy 1, but haven't kept up with that in a bit. For example, adding a new method to 'String', in the example given, looks a bit more work than it used to be, and doesn't reference the metaclass.

I've got a vested interest in seeing continual uptake of Groovy, but am wondering what's holding back adoption from those of you who do Java work but haven't integrated Groovy in to your toolset.

eweise• 14 years ago

I've used groovy in the past on grails projects but haven't adopted it more because its dynamically typed and slower than java. I have adopted scala as my main language however, since it can be used as a direct replacement for java.

zmmmmm5• 14 years ago

So would the static compilation / type checking features have made a difference to you in your choice of language?

I'm sort of half in love with the idea, half in horror - I can pick and choose which parts of my code I want to be static and which parts dynamic - is it the best of all worlds or a dogs breakfast of incomprehensible and conflicting paradigms? I don't know, but I think it's one of the first popular and well established languages to offer this so I consider it really intriguing to see how it plays out.

oddthink• 14 years ago

What's the current state of Groovy? Has it seen much adoption, compared to something like Jython or JRuby? Does it have any commonly-acknowledged flaws?

I looked at it years ago, around when it first came out, and it gave me a negative impression as being sloppily done and a bit amateurish, so I went with Jython. My impression is that they cleaned up their act and saw decent adoption, but I don't know any more than that. It seems eclipsed these days in favor of Clojure and Scala.

jbarmash4• 14 years ago

Yeah, the adoption is pretty good, definitely compared to Jython / JRuby. Multiple conferences dedicated primarily to groovy / grails (gr8conf US coming up on Minneapolis on 30-31).

I think Grails is driving a lot of adoption, but I also see it popping up in vendor products that need a scripting language or DSL that integrates with Java easily. Neo4J and Cloudify (Gigaspaces product) come to mind as recent examples.

zmmmmm5• 14 years ago

Yep. A lot of groovy adoption is "under the radar" precisely because it blends so seamlessly with Java. It may just be a build script or used in unit tests, but it is popping up all over the place.

steven_h• 14 years ago

Banner, the software quite a few universities use for student record management and other things, has migrated from PL/SQL to a Groovy on Grails system in their next version so that will push a bunch of people to learn Groovy.

mping• 14 years ago

For me, Groovy always have this feeling that's quite the opposite of Scala: it seems that it was a language that wasn't very thoroughly implemented and has all of these bolt-on stuff on top of it. Scala seems more solid to me because of the academic background (to think that a type system can be turing complete..), and it seems that Clojure found a place on its own.

In general terms, one of the flaws for me is that I can't quite decide what's the direction that Groovy's going. For example, the 2.0v is introducion static features, but AFAIK I never noticed any interest on static features (of course the groovy team should have much more to say on this). Other thing that I didn't like was the stack traces when an exception ocurred: due to the nature of the MOP, the stack traces were always very full of 'garbage' (this was some time ago, I don't know what's the story now). Another example is on the link: if you want to enable invokedynamic, you have to switch some flag on the compiler. If you compare to jRuby (which I know is not directly comparable but as an end user I really don't care) it's alread turned on if you are using the proper jRuby and JDK versions.

OTOH, I think Groovy nailed the Java interop spot on (flawless Java invocation/interop, integration with Ant, maven, etc) which is probably one of the good reasons to use Groovy.

If you consider SO to give a reasonable feedback on popularity, here's the nr of tagged questions:

  * scala 549
  * jruby 342
  * groovy 599
  * clojure 120
  * ruby (for comparison) 7,115

Having this said, I still think that Grails is one of the best web frameworks for the JVM, although I would like it more if the plugins would have better maintenance by the community.

soc884• 14 years ago

This is my impression, too. I think Groovy's "static" features are a reaction to a lot of developers realizing that "statically typed" doesn't necessarily mean that the language has to be as cumbersome and verbose as Java.

Imho, there is just no reason for building/using/preferring a dynamically typed language, except when the language designer lacks the necessary abilities to build a sound and coherent type system.

Scala has none of Groovy's drawbacks, a lot of benefits combined with a clear roadmap -- and most importantly: The determination to not only get something working, but also to get it right.

Meanwhile, the language gets more consistent and polished with every release.

blktiger• 14 years ago

The static features in Groovy 2.0 look like they were integrated from the Groovy++ project. Seeing as how there was an entire side-project created by the community I'd say there was a big interest in adding static type checking to Groovy.

http://code.google.com/p/groovypptest/wiki/Welcome

soc884• 14 years ago

As far as I know they still lack even a language spec.

gr8ful2• 14 years ago

YAM (Yet another myth). It is in the JCP.

jbarmash4• 14 years ago

In terms of some of the organizations I know that are using it: IEEE, NetFlix uses it for many internal apps, Target, one of the largest hedge funds in NY area, LiquidNet. I think there are less publisized stories about it because it is more focused on enterprise, which naturally is less open about what they use. However, the community is great, there are a ton of plugins, and VMWare has done a good job continuing to support it as parts of SpringSource ecosystem.

It's the same way that there are so many Spring / Java apps being written out there (including in startups), but they rarely come up on HN as opposed to some of the newer kids on the block, ala node.js or rails.

lkrubner• 14 years ago

This is very wrong:

"It seems eclipsed these days in favor of Clojure and Scala."

Your view of reality is being warped by the Hacker News bubble. Consider the results of Google Trend:

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=grails,+clojure&ctab=0&#...

Mind you, I'm comparing Clojure, the whole language, to Grails, which is just one framework. While it is true that most Groovy work involves Grails, there is also some Groovy work that does not, so the results of this comparison, if anything, understate the gap between Groovy and Clojure.

vorg7• 14 years ago

Virtually all Groovy work involved Grails. There's no other reason to adopt Groovy. If you need standalone scripts in an IDE, it's easier to use, say, Eclipse Xtend (http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/06/xtend-release-10)

enry_straker• 14 years ago

To those who knock groovy, just give it a try.

As a long time java user, i was very reluctant to learn groovy and it took grails for me to really tune into groovy. Now it's really hard for me to go back to java. :)

I also personally feel that static compilation is more of a marketing sop to the hard-core java crowd to help move them over to the dark side but what the hey, if it works, it's good for groovy.

ilcavero• 14 years ago

so what was the performance improvement of invoke dynamic in the end? there doesn't seem to be any benchmark on the web at the moment.

mahmud• 14 years ago

Amen!

Wont people talk about Invoke-dynamic? how did it work out in the end?

benmccann2• 14 years ago

I might finally have to take a look at Grails now that there's static type checking. Do I need to wait for a new release of Grails to use Grovvy 2.0 with it or can I do that now? Also, I'm curious if it can be turned on globally when calling the compiler instead of having to annotate all of my classes with @CompileStatic?

benmccann2• 14 years ago

Looks like it'll be in Grails 2.2: http://jira.grails.org/browse/GRAILS-9225

mindcrime2• 14 years ago

I'm pretty excited about this, personally. Our startup[1] is building mostly in Groovy and using Grails, and we've been very happy with the decision so far. To my mind, one of the biggest knocks on Groovy has been performance, so it's good to see them moving forward aggressively with taking advantage of invokedynamic and working to improve performance.

The JRuby guys got quite an improvement out of using invokedynamic, IIRC, so hopefully this bodes well for the future of Groovy. As others have said, Groovy is quite remarkable. To date, it remains my favorite JVM language (not to take anything away from Clojure, Scala, JRuby, Fantom, Nice, Beanshell, Jython, Kotlin, Fortress, Joy, Ceylon, etc).

[1]: Fogbeam Labs, the up-and-coming Open Source collaboration/knowledge-management company. http://www.fogbeam.com Go there now and sign up for our newsletter. It's not necessary for you to spend the rest of your day thinking about how cool Fogbeam Labs are, and how much you want to email all your friends and tell them about us too. But if you can remember a time when you were really excited about a company like Fogbeam Labs, then think back to those feelings and how that made you feel, and do the right thing.

jbarmash4• 14 years ago

Agreed. I also chose Grails for my startup 3 years ago, and have been very happy with decision. Allowed us to deliver a huge amount of functionality quickly. And Grails 2.0 has been out for six months, that's been great. 2.1 has some nice things in it (about to come out imminently), and I think they are going to try to get Groovy 2.0 into Grails in 2.2, which will be awesome!

mindcrime2• 14 years ago

and I think they are going to try to get Groovy 2.0 into Grails in 2.2, which will be awesome!

Definitely. I'm very much looking forward to Groovy 2 support in Grails. We're just about to migrate our project to the Grails 2.x series, to start getting ready for the new hotness.

sjd• 14 years ago

Groovy and Grails are both amazing, been doing development for quite sometime and have tried various languages. Can honestly for a new web based application I would chose Grails over the others.

gr8ful2• 14 years ago

I've been monitoring adoption for some time. There was a (roughly) three+ year period where Groovy was the fastest growing language in the world. Scala has seen more growth over the past year, but IMHO it will never challenge Groovy. Why? Functional languages have been around for years and have never owned more than a niche market due to their complexity. Groovy is more readable than Java, and much more readable then Scala or Closure.

Remember COBOL dominated the US for many years due to it's simplicity. PowerBuilder beat a more comprehensive competitor (SQL Windows) due to it's simplicity. It seems likely that functional languages may find a niche where they fit well (e.g. business rules) but languages like Groovy seem most likely to achieve wide adoption. IMHO of course!

soc884• 14 years ago

It's funny how that "functional" name calling appears so convenient if it fits the own argumentation. (Not considering that Scala is foremost an object-oriented language.)

Groovy is trying to play catch-up with Java currently (typing-wise) and I don't see how they will implement a modern type system in the next decade with the amount of cruft they have accumulated since Groovy's inception.

Additionally, Java 8 will ship with closures, so I'm not seeing where a niche for Groovy will remain.

nithril4• 14 years ago

As for scala.

zmmmmm5• 14 years ago

> Functional languages have been around for years and have never owned more than a niche market due to their complexity

I think the problem is that writing in a functional way almost requires a purist approach, so the only way in is to completely buy into the "dogma" of it. That makes adoption hard to impossible.

Groovy is almost completely the opposite - every practical whim is catered for, almost to a fault - there's all kinds of crazy stuff shoved into it. But boy is it easy to adopt. It's a quite stunning achievement how much is in Groovy and yet still - it remains almost source compatible with Java.

marcpa00• 14 years ago

The language has matured and so has the implementation. Static type checking will reassure those "programming in the large". Static compilation will help those "programming for the fast lane". A bunch of syntactic simplifications will help those creating DSL for the so called "business user". Groovy, Grails, Griffon, Gradle, all on playing well in the JVM ecosystem : this is exciting !

nithril4• 14 years ago

This is a great news. Groovy becomes more and more mature and efficient.

What’s new in Groovy 2.0?

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