❯ Guillaume Laforge

JavaOne: Groovy reactions!

conference groovy

The JavaOne crowd is applauding Groovy! And the blogosphere is full of friendly comments towards our dynamic and agile scripting language for the JVM.

Jeremy Rayner (our co-JSR-241 spec lead, and JSR project lead) compiled a list of blog posts related to Rod Cope’s JavaOne presentation, titled “Groovy = Java Technology + Ruby + Python for the JVM”. Rod Cope, OpenLogic’s CTO and Founder, has already given a few talks about Groovy, and evangelizes its use at various events. But he doesn’t only “speak” about Groovy, he’s also eating his own dog food, because his company flagship product BlueGlue embeds over 100,000 lines of Groovy code!

Here’s the list compiled by Jeremy:

  • Artima’s Eric Armstrong proposed a thourough article on Groovy, saying JavaOne’s day One was a Groovy day!
  • The Server Side also talked about the presentation and it seemed that my Scriptom (my pet sub-project and creation) yielded Wooww’s and Aahh’s moments in the audience, when Rod controlled an Excel spreadsheet from a groovysh console! Awesome!
  • Even funnier, amicrosoftie talked about Groovy!
  • Dion, a long time Groovy affictionado, discusses Microsoft’s Eric Gunnerson comments
  • Ed Burns seems to be also impressed with Groovy’s terseness.
  • ClientJava.com is having his “whoa cool” moment while staring at Rod’s Excel manipulation through Scriptom. And a user even commented that: “There is probably no specific reason you’d have to use Groovy besides the “cleaness” that you mention it provides”.
  • Finally, Ryan Daigle talks about two nice use cases regarding how to leverage Ant from Groovy, and how you can easily script ActiveX/COM components

Overall, it seemed everybody was pretty entertained by Rod’s great presentation, and enthousiasted by the progresses Groovy made over a year of hard and passionate work. I’m impatiently looking forward to the day we’ll release our first final release!

Groovy’s more and more used in production settings, like Rod’s BlueGlue, or Ludovic Dubost’s XWiki which hosts a farm of over 3500 Groovy-powered wikis with well over 600,000 page views per month. And we’ve got some financial companies which already use or are planning to use Groovy to allow its business analysts to customize their apps’ behavior and business logic.

JavaOne’s day One was a Groovy Day, and we can forsee a bright future for Groovy! Mustang’s betas incorporate the JSR-223 scripting APIs that Groovy totally supports, so they may even ship the next betas with Groovy if Sun wanted. A big name company (I can’t name yet) should probably talk soon about how they leverage Groovy to control and administer clusters of application servers… And there’s more to come, so stay tuned and download Groovy ASAP!