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Have you considered starting with Grails? It's a much easier jump into the "java-ish" world. The main benefit is you can choose to run a grails application and

by columbo 13y ago

Have you considered starting with Grails? It's a much easier jump into the "java-ish" world. The main benefit is you can choose to run a grails application and rely on java jars for when you need performance boosts.

wasd 13y ago
We've been using Groovy internally for a few years for prototyping and experimentation. I thought about slowly introducing Grails as an alternative to Spring for some projects. My experience was that it vaguely reminded me of Rails but needed a lot more polish. I had a huge issue trying to chase down archaic stacktraces and found that there is little developer momentum pushing it forward. I usually found myself googling and reading random blogs to figure out simple things I couldn't infer from the docs. Where as Rails magically makes things work, I found that a lot of times Grails made things magically not work. I wouldn't personally suggest it for anything customer facing.
- vorg 13y ago
  You could use JRuby and Rails if you need the JVM. Groovy's OK for wraparounds testing and/or running Java classes, what it was originally intended for, bringing closures and terser list/map syntax (altho JRuby et al have those too). It's all rather slooooow though. Grails uses Groovy's MOP which was added later, but I don't use them much. I toyed with Groovy's interceptors and categories when they were added, even wrote notes on them, but they broke in the upgrade from 1.5 to 1.6. There's a lot of such cruft in Groovy which just lapses from version to version through lack of use and support. They brought in AST transforms to get programmers to extend Groovy's functionality, but when they do, the Groovy managers wil swipe the code and pass it off as their own in the next version of Groovy (e.g. Groovy++ written by Alex Tkachman was cloned as the static compilation in Groovy 2.0 and the static traits in the upcoming Groovy 2.2). tldr... Use grOOvy for quickies handling Java classes, and for Grails where it's required, but look at a serious programming language for anything larger.
  - wasd 13y ago
    I would much prefer using JRuby/Rails but we have a bus factor of 1 with Ruby :(.

by columbo 13y ago

wasd 13y ago

We've been using Groovy internally for a few years for prototyping and experimentation. I thought about slowly introducing Grails as an alternative to Spring for some projects. My experience was that it vaguely reminded me of Rails but needed a lot more polish. I had a huge issue trying to chase down archaic stacktraces and found that there is little developer momentum pushing it forward. I usually found myself googling and reading random blogs to figure out simple things I couldn't infer from the docs. Where as Rails magically makes things work, I found that a lot of times Grails made things magically not work. I wouldn't personally suggest it for anything customer facing.

vorg 13y ago
You could use JRuby and Rails if you need the JVM. Groovy's OK for wraparounds testing and/or running Java classes, what it was originally intended for, bringing closures and terser list/map syntax (altho JRuby et al have those too). It's all rather slooooow though. Grails uses Groovy's MOP which was added later, but I don't use them much. I toyed with Groovy's interceptors and categories when they were added, even wrote notes on them, but they broke in the upgrade from 1.5 to 1.6. There's a lot of such cruft in Groovy which just lapses from version to version through lack of use and support. They brought in AST transforms to get programmers to extend Groovy's functionality, but when they do, the Groovy managers wil swipe the code and pass it off as their own in the next version of Groovy (e.g. Groovy++ written by Alex Tkachman was cloned as the static compilation in Groovy 2.0 and the static traits in the upcoming Groovy 2.2). tldr... Use grOOvy for quickies handling Java classes, and for Grails where it's required, but look at a serious programming language for anything larger.
- wasd 13y ago
  I would much prefer using JRuby/Rails but we have a bus factor of 1 with Ruby :(.