This chapter covers
- What Groovy is all about
- How it makes your programming life easier
- How to start
It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.
Muhammad Ali
You’ve heard of Groovy, maybe even installed the distribution and tried snippets from the online tutorials. Perhaps your project has adopted Groovy as a dynamic extension to Java and you now seek information about what you can do with it. You may have been acquainted with Groovy from using the Grails web application platform, the Griffon desktop application framework, the Gradle build system, or the Spock testing facility, and now look for background information about the language that these tools are built upon. This book delivers to that purpose, but you can expect even more from learning Groovy.
Groovy will give you quick wins, whether by making your Java code simpler to write, by automating recurring tasks, by modeling business logic in domain-specific languages (DSLs), or by supporting ad-hoc scripting for your daily work as a programmer. It’ll give you longer-term wins by making your code simpler to read. Perhaps most important, it’s a pleasure to use.