Who Is Using Groovy
Stelligent: How are people using Groovy- what projects are you aware of that rely on Groovy?
Guillaume: In fact, we don't
hear that much about how people use Groovy in their projects. People
are usually more talkative when they have problems, rather than when
they're happy with something!
Most of the time, they embed Groovy in their J2EE application as a scripting language: they like using our
Groovlet servlets and our
template engines.
Some others use Groovy as a shell language replacement, or as a testing
platform because tests are easy to write in Groovy. A few persons use
Groovy as a prototyping tool to create demos for their customers. There
are many use cases, really.
Every six months or so, I try to make a small survey on the Groovy
mailing lists, to know what people think about Groovy, and what they do
with it. There are some funny cases, like a guy who used Groovy to
control his homemade robots, and he reported that using Groovy really
saved him hundreds of lines of code and he could concentrate more on
the AI logic of his robots than on the boring and tedious coding tasks!
To name a few projects that already embed Groovy successfully, you may have a look at:
- Drools: a rule engine that allows you to write your conditions and consequences in Groovy.
- The RIFE MVC/Web framework also permits you to write actions in Groovy or to configure the webapp layout and flow.
- The eXo Platform (Portlet/Service container) uses Groovy in its core, and you can even write some Portlets in Groovy.
- XWiki,
a wiki engine and application platform, embeds Groovy for advanced wiki
programming, like writing plug-ins or macros, or for pages containing
some logic, etc.
Many other projects utilize Groovy as a
dynamic extension mechanism. These examples are the best examples I
know. I've listened to a few guys discretely whispering to me that they
have deployed Groovy in their apps for months already, even with old
betas of Groovy which weren't really considered mature enough!
Stelligent: Yep, I've heard the
same thing! As we all know, Groovy isn't the only scripting language
available for Java. If someone in the Java community was looking at
adopting a scripting language for use and they were comparing Groovy
and Jython- what would you say?
Guillaume: It's hard for me to
compare Groovy with other languages. I haven't played much with the
alternatives, and I guess I'm pretty biased :-)
Before Groovy arrived on the Java-place, the other scripting
languages were a bit stalled, without any real innovation going on, or
sustained activity. Fortunately, Groovy renewed the interest in the
field, and thankfully, development was reborn on Jython, BeanShell or
JRuby. That's a very good thing!
Now, regarding the choice, except if you need particular Groovy features not available anywhere else (like our
builders, or handy libraries for
SQL,
etc.), I think the decision is around the knowledge of the developers:
If the developer is very familiar with Ruby or Python, it's certainly a
good idea to choose the Java-esque counterpart. If you prefer staying
as close as possible to Java, choose BeanShell, or if you're a
JavaScript guru, don't go further than Rhino.
Some compelling features may direct you to Groovy, and its Java-ish
syntax may be appealing to you. Choosing a scripting language is really
about analyzing the set of language and API features you need, and the
knowledge your users have regarding other languages.
Stelligent: As a final thought- what other projects do you find interesting?
Guillaume: There are plenty of them!
But since it's a Groovy related interview, let me mention some projects embedding or using Groovy that I'm quite a fan of:
- Ludovic Dubost's XWiki
project, a second generation wiki engine and collaborative application
platform, embeds Groovy as a way to extend XWiki by writing templates
or plug-ins, or to manipulate the domain classes and objects you define
in your pages. That's a really powerful platform for writing custom
applications on top of a wiki engine. I like the fact it's a wiki (with
all the standard features you can expect from a wiki), but it is more
advanced than say Confluence, in the way it allows you to write custom
forms or logic on top of your documents. And Groovy is a key element
for that innovative aspect of the project.
- I'm expecting a lot from a newly born Groovy sub-project called Grails
which is a promising webapp framework for CRUD oriented apps, following
an MVC approach, with a transparent persistence mechanism, and which
applies the coding by convention paradigm to lower or remove the need
for long and boring XML configuration or mapping files and other
boilerplate code. It's really just in its infancy (started in early
July), but I think it has a very high potential to become a driver for
the whole Groovy community and for providing an easy introduction to
webapps development for new Java developers. Stay tuned!
- There are other interesting projects using Groovy, such as Geert Bevin's RIFE
framework which contains a CRUD-part which allows you to define your
domain classes in Groovy, and ta-da, you've got a CRUD webapp deployed
in no time. There's also the eXo Platform from Benjamin Mestrallet
which uses Groovy in its core for various things.
原文地址:http://www.stelligent.com/content/articles/article.php?topicId=81&pageName=Who+Is+Using+Groovy
附:
Groovy轻松入门——Grails实战之GORM篇
posted on 2007-04-16 20:23
山风小子 阅读(1398)
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