Ruby to Groovy

Question

I have a framework written in Ruby that needs to be converted into Groovy.
It does not use anything outside of core ruby, but a lot of meta programming.

Are all the same basic features supported by Groovy and is the changeover complicated?

Answer 1

I suspect it might not be easy (depending on size, functionality etc.), and it's not so much of a translation as a rewrite. Whenever I find myself thinking of doing a rewrite, I refer myself to Joel's musings on this before going any further.

Why do you need to rework this in Groovy ? If you need the JVM (say, to integrate additional libraries/frameworks), have you looked at JRuby ? It might save you a lot of work and pain.

Answer 2

Groovy and Ruby are not terribly different, but the metaprogramming aspect changes a bit.

Although I am not a Groovy expert, I can refer to you some pointers in the documentation (http://groovy.codehaus.org/Dynamic+Groovy):

Dynamic method calling:

# Ruby
an_instance.send("method_name")

// Groovy
anInstance."$methodName"()

Method missing:

# Ruby
def method_missing(meth, *args, &blk)
  # Some code
end

// Groovy
def methodMissing(String name, args) {
  // Some code
}

Adding methods to a class at runtime:

# Ruby
class SomeObject
  define_method :new_method do
    # Do something
  end
end

// Groovy
SomeObject.metaClass.newMethod = {->
  // Do something
}