concept Groovy code in category groovy

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Groovy in Action, Second Edition. Login to get full access to this book.

First, we need to introduce you to the tools you’ll be using to run and optionally compile Groovy code. If you want to try these out as you read, you’ll need to have Groovy installed, of course. Appendix A provides a guide for the installation process.

Groovy syntax is line-oriented, but the execution of Groovy code is not. Unlike other scripting languages, Groovy code isn’t processed line-by-line in the sense that each line is interpreted separately.

Figure 2.8. Flowchart of the Groovy bytecode generation process when executed in the runtime environment or compiled into *.class files. Different options for executing Groovy code involve different targets for the bytecode produced, but the parser and class generator are the same in each case.