...more groovy

So additionally, I want to mention that I'm planning on trying out using Groovy on the next work project because its main use is to build a library to access our data that is usually in a database, but not quite always. The Groovy tutorial also seemed to lead me in a way to two other topics. First, Test Driven Development... The last lab for Groovy was to use it to test java classes. That seems to be one of the more powerful uses for Groovy, and I'll definitely be playing with that soon. Maybe I'll even use that as a way to introduce Groovy to some others at work using JUnit and Groovy to test our classes. The other presentation that I attended this morning was on Native XML databases...

Groovy 101?

I attended Andrew Glover's Groovy 101 tutorial and I have to say that I was fairly impressed at some of the stuff that you could do very easily in Groovy. I definitely do not like the name, but that aside I decided to give some Groovy coding a try.

Firstly, it is really easy to move into Groovy programming because standard Java is also Groovy. The syntax is legal. Also, the Groovy code compiles to Java byte code so you can call Groovy from Java and vice versa. Definitely go to the Groovy homepage to see what Groovy looks like. So far my favorite things are the SQL connectors and the MarkupBuilders. So much boilerplate or at least tedious code is completely taken care of by Groovy itself, so you can focus on the actual problem. That's much better.

I'm trying to replace a javascript that we use to launch some Java apps with a Groovy script. More later...

Overall, I enjoyed Andrew's tutorial. He was the first of many presenters to use a Mac at the conference. Wish I had one...