One of the technologies I’ve been playing around with recently is the Groovy language. It’s an interesting language as it offers a number of features not found in Java. Some of the these are features of the language itself, some are just additional libraries.
Some of the language features are:
- No need for getters and setters.
- Closures
- Mixins
- Native lists and maps
- Native regular expressions
- Native support for markup languages like HTML or XML
- Native interaction with Java.
and some of the library features are:
- Simplified file IO.
- Simplified database and SQL usage.
- Simplified XML parsing.
- Better support for configuration files with the ConfigSlurper class.
- Built in support for creating mocks and stubs for testing purposes.
If you haven’t already played around with Groovy, I’d strongly encourage you to take a look. The main website is:
You can get the Eclipse plugin from: