The Four Pillars of Groovy Adoption
Groovy in and of itself is a very good language. We have been using it for many years now in our shipping products. Yet, there is still to be a ground swell of adoption of the language. Part of the problem may be the relative obscurity of the language, or a misconception around its "scripting" nature. I do believe that we need to do some evangelism on the language.
Even so, I see four different pillars that the community can leverage to drive adoption. Out of these four, two are Groovy specific:
- JSR-223 providing a standardized way to call dynamic languages within Java code.
- Spring 2.0 treating dynamic languages beans as first class citizen within the framework. You can define you beans in groovy without compiling it and inject it into another Spring bean.
- Grails. Brings many of the principles that are making Ruby on Rails successful to the Java platform without the, er, attitude displayed by the Rails core team.
- Groovy In Action. Having one or more books on a technology is usually a milestone toward wider adoption of a technology. I will simply point to Dave Thomas's books on Ruby (Pickaxe 1 and 2) and Rails (Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails) as examples.
Groovy In Action will probably have the most immediate impact since having a book available in bookstores will increase the visibility of the language. It is currently going through Manning's early access program (MEAP), but the material so far is pretty good.
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