Groovy is a dynamic, object-oriented programming language for the Java platform. Its name comes from slang, where “groovy” means “cool”, “amazing” or “fashionable”. This programming language was designed to be so, but is it still groovy nowadays? Creator of Groovy, James Strachan, admitted that he wouldn’t have created Groovy if he had known anything about Scala. But his project started living its own life. Let’s take a look at what it has to offer us now.

It’s easy for a Java developer

Groovy is easy. Most of the code you write in Java will compile and work as expected when you try to run it as a Groovy program. Sure, sometimes you’ll be surprised by Groovy’s behaviour, but such cases are very limited. For example, == operator won’t compare instances but call equals() method instead. Isn’t it more intuitive though?

The learning curve for Groovy is flat: it won’t be challenging for someone who is fluent in Java. Also you don’t need to learn everything new from Groovy, you can discover new features step by step, so you won’t get overwhelmed.

I would never say that Groovy is a successor of Java or a language that will soon take over the world. But certainly it’s a great support tool whose knowledge will be beneficial. Knowing it will definitely increase your chances of getting your dream job.

Groovy’s syntax is groovy

Groovy was thought out and designed to be less verbose than Java. Unnecessary semicolons, lots of syntactic sugar help you write faster and also without worrying about most of boilerplate code. Let’s compare:

// Java 7
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
    System.out.println("Hello world, " + i);
}
// Java 8
IntStream.range(0, 10).forEach(i -> {
    System.out.println("Hello world, " + i);
});

// Groovy
(0..9).each {
    println "Hello world, $it"
}

Sure, Java 8 and Stream API are a huge step towards better expressiveness, but I believe these examples are still way too verbose (or less expressive) in pure Java world:

["Let’s", "create", "a", "list"] //java.util.ArrayList
["Let’s", "create", "a", "set"] as Set //java.util.LinkedHashSet

class Person {
  int id
  String name, surname
  //let Groovy compiler generate all setters and getters!
}
//named constructor parameters, only for default constructor
new Person(id: 1, name: 'John', surname: 'Doe')

Groovy is functional

Functional languages, although created in the 1950s (Lisp), are getting popular again. More and more of such languages are appearing, like Clojure, Scala and our Groovy on JVM platform, Haskell and F# outside of it. In such languages functions are first-class citizens, which Wikipedia explains this way:

this means the language supports passing functions as arguments to other functions, returning them as the values from other functions, and assigning them to variables or storing them in data structures

I wouldn’t like to focus on the functional aspects, but rather on the possibility of getting familiar with the new and completely different programming paradigm that Groovy offers. For Java developers, this paradigm might be very confusing and new. Java 8, although it is getting close to it with closures, is not fully a functional language. This article explains well why. Some people will say that Groovy is also not a pure functional language either. It only allows functional programming as one of available paradigms, just like Scala does. Learning functional programming in Groovy, again, will be easy — it will just look like another feature. You will have to start thinking in a brand new way, but without learning new syntax, like it would happen with Clojure or Haskell. But on the other hand — you’ll often have a temptation to do things in an old, known way. Every coin has two sides, but for me the ability to play with functional programming is definitely a virtue of Groovy.

You can seamlessly integrate Groovy and Java

These two languages just work well with each other. You can make Java classes call Groovy code back and forth and it will work just fine. No special language constructions or third party libraries. You can use this to write the following:

import org.junit.Test
import static org.junit.Assert.assertEquals

public class JunitTest {
    @Test
    public void 'jUnit test written in groovy'() throws Exception {
        assertEquals(55, (0..10).sum())
    }
}

This is a test written in Groovy, using jUnit framework (written for Java), ran by jUnit runner. Groovy and Java integrated seamlessly. Normal Java classes will work perfectly with Groovy classes as well, the Java compiler will even see and use setters and getters generated by Groovy.

Beautiful tests in Spock

The example above shows that you can use good ol’ jUnit spiced with Groovy’s syntactic sugar. My favourite feature is naming methods as strings containing spaces — it’s so much easier to read! But Peter Niederwieser wished to go one step further and created a full framework that helps to write better tests — Spock. It forces you to use given-when-then sections, which helps you think of correct test construction; it gives a concise and almost graphic way to write parametrized tests; when a test fails — it shows graphically which assertion failed. Let the code speak:

class SpockTest extends Specification {
    @Unroll
    def 'should compute square root of #number correctly'() {
        expect:
        assert root == Math.sqrt(number)

        where:
        number | root
        1      | 1
        4      | 2
        9      | 3
        16     | 4
        25     | 6
    }
}

Note the @Unroll annotation. It will expand your test case into five separate ones. Each one named as you wish - thanks to “#number” placeholder. Running the tests will result in:

io.tech.allegro.SpockTest > should compute square root of 25 correctly FAILED
Condition not satisfied:

     root == Math.sqrt(number)
     |    |       |    |
     6    false   5.0  25

There are more arguments in favour of Spock — its homepage sums it up nicely.

Gradle

Gradle is a build tool that is gaining popularity rapidly. Google chose Gradle as build tool for Android — that’s enough to say about its potential. Gradle is covered in more detail in this blog post. I would like to add that you don’t need to know Groovy to use Gradle at a basic level. But knowing it gives you an actual understanding of what happens under the hood and can get you to the pro level.

Widening your horizons

The last argument is not directly in favour of Groovy. Learning new things is always good, it widens your horizons, you start to look at things from a different perspective. Groovy can give you insight into functional programming, shows that things can be more concise or just better than what you know. For wise employers it’s very valuable to know that you have not only deep knowledge, but also wide horizons, an ability and urge to learn new things. This increases your chances to find and get a dream job.

Every coin has two sides

Of course Groovy isn’t a perfect tool for every application. Great in script-like, Groovy is not necessarily equally useful in normal, production coding. While dynamic typing gives you a productivity boost when writing code, it slows down refactoring afterwards. That’s a huge drawback if you have dozens of classes in a project tangled by dependencies. There’s a way to turn on static compilation, but that’s disabling most of Groovy’s features. However, with regular compilation syntax errors will be seen only at runtime. Also in Groovy lots of magic happens behind the scenes. Every piece of that magic potentially might turn into a very hard to trace bug in your code. Furthermore, the future of Groovy is very uncertain. Pivotal, major sponsor of Groovy for the last few years, has stopped its financial support in March this year. This will slow down the development of Groovy.

Summary

In the paragraphs above I tried to show some interesting features, applications and frameworks of Groovy and the cost at which we get these. The true power of Groovy lies in tests and scripting, when speed of coding, ease and readability are the most important matters. In my opinion, despite its faults, Groovy is a good tool every engineer should know.