Groovy Still On Top

When Pivotal declared that Grails and Groovy where mature products and no longer needed sponsorship, alot of people feared the worst but Groovy has shown that you don’t need a large corporation for a language to continue to thrive.

Groovy has jumped onto the top20 index time and time again and was up for nomination for language of the year for 2018 only to get bumped by GO. But it is back again thanks to the strong adoption by the devops community with projects like Rundeck, Jenkins and others.

And even some of the most widely used API frameworks use Groovy as well.

So what has caused the powerful Java-based language to remain on top for so long?

Simple to Adopt and Learn

Groovy is a language that has TONS of tools (spring-boot, Grails, Jenkins, Gradle) in wide adoption throughout the industry. You may be surprised to know you are probably already using it in your development shop without even knowing it.

And developers find it easy to learn because the language is so similar to ones the already know. As a classic example, here are some Groovy and Ruby functions compared side-by-side:

Integration

Because Groovy is just a layer on top of Java, Groovy integrates 100% with Java. That is to say all Java classes and libraries can be used in Groovy projects without issues. And often vice versa but only when:

• Groovy is statically compiled
• Groovy is built without “convenience methods”

Speed & Scale

As Groovy is just a layer on top of Java, it has Java’s speed and scale. And the better you code your Groovy, the better your speed and scale.

People have spread FUD saying Groovy is slow when benchmarks have NEVER shown this to be true and in fact, Groovy has always allowed the ability to be statically compiled to get identical speeds to Java.

The beauty of Groovy comes in the fact that you can dynamically build during development to speed up development time. Then once you have a stable build, statically build and compile.

Java’s slow development comes in the fact that you have to statically compile and build CONSTANTLY. Groovy bypasses this by allowing you to do dynamic development and then statically build and compile once stable. This decreases development by 2–3X!!

All in all, Groovy not only can cut your development time and costs but can give you a roadmap to scaling your architecture and software from a scrappy startup to enterprise level traffic and services without ever having to think about a rewrite ever again.