Since 2007, Groovy has climbed 2 versions, and is looking forward to the release of version 3 later this year. Anyone who has worked with Groovy will tell you just how much simplicity it brings into the overall Java development environment, and how relatable it can be to programming languages such as Python. Last year, Groovy opened its doors to Android developers — which sparked a lot more interest in the language and earlier this year Groovy made an official move to the Apache foundation.
Apache Groovy is a powerful, optionally typed and dynamic language, with static-typing and static compilation capabilities, for the Java platform aimed at improving developer productivity thanks to a concise, familiar and easy to learn syntax. It integrates smoothly with any Java program, and immediately delivers to your application powerful features, including scripting capabilities, Domain-Specific Language authoring, runtime and compile-time meta-programming and functional programming.
It may not seem much at first, but even a few glimpses of this magnificent project can inspire you to try it out and take a true test drive for yourself. Groovy is climbing up to the top very rapidly in the recent years, and we expect this project to become somewhat of a standard in more ways than just one.
Official Homepage
For any language and/or framework, the best place to start is always going to be the homepage. The Groovy website features all the default documentations and example pages that you could ever ask for, and it also lists a number of third party community resources that you can become a part of today.
Learn Groovy in Y Minutes
The Learn X in Y minutes series website has been incredibly successful over the years, and without going into too much depth about it, it’s basically a way of introducing yourself to the language without encountering any real world barriers. It’s a great way to explore the syntax and the general language functionality, and is a good starting place before diving into more in-depth material such as tutorials and books.
Groovy Playground
Groovy Playground is exactly what you would expect it to be, a coding playground. Here you can play around with your Groovy cody (presumably with what you learned in previous resource) and see how it all comes together in the end.
Groovy Web Console
The Groovy Web Console is a website for sharing and executing Groovy programming snippets of code! You can play around with your own scripts, or you can load scripts from previously executed scripts and see what other developers are making. Great to find some last moment inspiration.
Groovy Koans
Koans are all about tests/challenges. This is what this website gives to Groovy developers — a number of quests that require patience and understanding of some core concepts in order to be fully understood and executed. It’s a great way to hack away a couple of hours during the weekend to get a real taste for the language itself.
Groovy SQL
If you’re an avid SQL programmer and Groovy seems like your cup of tea, this tutorial will be a great place to start to get yourself up to speed about the correlation between SQL and Groovy and how can both work together beautifully. It’s an insightful and knowledge packed tutorial, enjoy it.
Groovy & Java 8
Java 8 is on the shelves, but what is in for Groovy developers? This more than an hour long talk goes in-depth about the latest developments in Java 8, Groovy, and how both can help each other to provide a more concise and structured development experience.
