>From my point of view, Groovy and to a lesser extent Grails aren't considered as sexy or cutting edge as some of the other VM languages out there. This is exactly why they make great choices.
The interop story between Java and Groovy has always been great and continues to get better all the time with almost cut and paste source compatibility from Java to Groovy. There also continues to be a ton of innovation in the Groovy community that exposes a large number of developers to concepts like closures, Meta Object Protocol and joint compilation. While languages like Scala, Fan, Clojure may be cool and interesting from a learning/scientific point of view, I wouldn't want to "bet the farm" on them. Don't get me wrong, these are great languages with a lot of innovation but for my dev team, introducing these into the mix would be a detriment. Not the case with Groovy. We have adopted Groovy and have a veritable ton of groovy code in our app. We have customers writing groovy that runs within our architecture as well. Give me stable and predictable over shiny and new everyday. And if it's good enough for Fred, it's good enough for me :P Todd ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Frederic Simon Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 2:32 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [The Java Posse] Re: Rebuttal of groovy popularity assessment (episode #224) I just finished the migration of all the bash scripts we are using for integration tests (many laugh at me at Devoxx about my bash knowledge :), and it was an amazing experience. For me Groovy is the choice for a dynamic language on the JVM, and is very easy to learn for Java developers. Looking at something like easyb I think Groovy is going to be big for test platforms (Flexibility is a lot more critical than performance). Now I have a really nice test environment, thank you Groovy! On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 2:56 AM, Dick Wall <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Folks I wanted to assure people that I love the Groovy, I really do, and I like Guillaume, Graeme et al tremendously. We actually had quite a few news items for Groovy in 2008 (just search for groovy or grails in the search box on the javaposse.com site to see). However, I feel that there were quite a small number of news items to actually report on and this is what I was trying to communicate in the episode. It's always good to see big news items like "company X is writing its new super-web-app using grails" - and I think there was one of those during the year, but it just felt to me that not many crossed my news filter, which I like to think is a fairly unbiased way of assessing the ebb and flow of the industry (I try to keep the feed selection broad and include digg searches and other things like that). I hope that a 1.6 or 2.0 release will get a bit more notice for Groovy going again, and I certainly didn't mean to alienate any one. From the comment by Vince O'Sullivan on this topic, I am not the only one that feels like it might be slipping away. I say these things with love, honestly. My perfect future has Scala and Groovy as the modern language options on the JVM. Cheers Dick On Jan 5, 3:37 pm, greggobridges <[email protected]> wrote: > 1)The whiteboards at Devoxx (http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/ > devoxx_2008_whiteboard_votes) declared that groovy was the most > popular JVM language that is not Java (37%, compared to 22% for scala > and 10% for jruby). It's not scientific, but it's worth something. > 2)Groovy had 74,000 downloads in November 2008 (I don't have scala's > november numbers, but it comes to less than 3,000 for December 2008). > 3)Groovy was recently acquired by SpringSource > 4)Take a look at a session list from the 'No Fluff Just Stuff' tour > and tell me that Groovy is not gaining momentum. > > The Posse said that there was not much groovy news. The only news that > was reported on the podcast was the aforementioned acquisition, as > well as the December release of v1.5.1 (reported in January); however, > groovy is now at 1.5.7 with a RC for 1.6 available. The eclipse groovy > plugin was updated, and netbeans added groovy support in 6.5 (not > reported in the news, but by Tor as an aside in the Holiday podcast). > > As a Groovy user, in 2008 I felt like the Scala Posse's redheaded > little brother <smack!>. -- http://www.jfrog.org/ http://freddy33.blogspot.com/ http://nothingisinfinite.blogspot.com/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
