Is Groovy a langage to know ?

Question

I am going to have some spare time and I'm looking in good ways to invest and improve my IT knowledge. The groovy langage seems to become more and more popular and I am a bit struggling to understand why.

Could someone explain me what makes groovy a langage to know ? Is it currently used in real projects ?

Thanks !

Answer 1

groovy is used in real projects -- anything done with Grails uses groovy. Java developers should be comfortable with groovy, for the most part what they know will server them well. There are a few exceptions, and groovy offers some syntactic sugar, but the learning curve is small.

Answer 2

Groovy is definitely used in real projects (and my experience suggests it's a growing trend), but perhaps not in as many ways as Java is used (or C#, C++, many others).

Groovy's syntax and ease of use are first-rate; I know of no other language in which I'd rather write code. But (1) Groovy is not as fast as Java (this matters, but not always a lot), and (2) Groovy is dynamically typed, leaving the door open to some bugs & regression that a staticly-typed language would catch for you.

As I see it, Groovy has 2 "sweet spots:"

• unit tests (OMG these are better in Groovy)
• simple command-line tools related to your project (these are x-platform and you can write & maintain them with your Java skills)