beginning groovy

last week i started to learn groovy. i think i heard about groovy for the first time at the beginning or in the middle of last year and it´s getting more and more popular. at a certain point last week my curiosity had reached maximum, so i gave it a try.

groovy is a dynamic programming language that runs on the JVM and it´s quite easy to learn for java programmers. as it runs on the jvm you can use existing java libraries in groovy as well as you can use groovy scripts in your java applications which at the moment seems the main use case to me. mainly due to its dynamic features groovy offers more flexibility and an increased productivity opposed to java in some cases, which is probably the primary goal of groovy. in other cases you will probably miss some of java´s features (mainly static typing).

my first impression of groovy is that with some experience you can do simple things really fast, for example text/data processing. in this case groovy comes with really helpful features like improved support for regular expressions, closures, builders, native support of lists and maps, ranges and groovy strings.

maybe the next days i will get into details of some the coolest features of groovy, e.g. closures, and when i feel experienced enough i`ll try grails, a groovy web application framework.