(4163) One Year of Groovy

Technical long talk 50 min

Thursday, 2008-06-26, 14:00 - 14:50, Arena 8

Aaron Digulla - Globus Informatik (speaker)

Topics

• Scripting

Abstract

After developing a fairly large software (20KLOC) in Groovy and maintaining it 
for the past 12 months, I'd like to share my experience with you:

- Why would I want to use Groovy in my projects?

- How long does it take for a seasoned Java developer to get to speed with 
Groovy?

- When you return to your code after a few months, do you still understand what 
it does?

- Groovy compiles to bytecode and you can call freely back and forth between it 
and Java. That's the marketing version. But where are the pitfalls? What's the 
advantage to mix Java and Groovy?

- Groovy does type checking at runtime and there are no checked exceptions. How 
does that help or hinder in the real world?

- Does Groovy really make testing more simple? If so, how?

- Groovy is developed by a bunch of dedicated developers spread around the 
globe. What happens when you need support? How long does it take to get a bug 
fixed? How stable is the language?