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There was a recent outburst in blogs on the topic of Groovy and how it compares to Java. Although I respect the youthfull entusiasim of Groovy and Co. working on this little exercise I'm just perplexed by the "WHY?" in this whole discussion. Let me just say again: W H Y ?!?! 1. Practically no one cares about Groovy (let alone Groovy++ strap-on) beyond Grails community. So this language just as "widely accepted" as Ruby (at least for enterprise software development) 2. If you know Java it's equally "challenging" to pick up either Groovy or Scala. Don't let anyone insult your intelligence by claiming that Scala syntax is somehow more complex than Groovy. In both languages you will need to adapt to functional thinking - and that's where you will have to spend a couple of weekends… 3. If you know Groovy - you already know 90% of Scala (different syntax and few extra features can be picked up in the evening) 4. Scala is designed by people who have proper academic background, experience and talent in the area of language design - Groovy has never been that way (and anyone who dares to look inside of Groovy runtime or history of changes in it will attest to that). NOTE: it did come out rather strong - but that's how I feel about it and after some thinking I'll leave as is. Nothing personal to anyone reading it… 5. Scala as a post-functional language is years ahead of Groovy (static typing with best-in-business type inference, highly tuned mix of imperative and functional styles, powerful and done-right generics, etc.) 6. Groovy will ALWAYS be slower than Scala or Java (latest benchmarks put even Groovy++ about 50 times slower than Java) just by its nature unless someone changes the language and rebuilds the runtime from the ground up. 7. Once we get decent integration with Eclipse, NetBeans and IDEA for Scala, the Groovy will lose its only serious advantage

Gaelyk is a lightweight Groovy toolkit for Google App Engine Java. Gaelyk lets you deploy small applications on Google App Engine Java. Gaelyk gives you the choice to use Groovy for developing your applications. Gaelyk builds upon Groovlets. and the Groovy template servlet Gaelyk allows you to cleanly seperate your views with Groovy templates and your actions in Groovlets. Gaelyk simplifies the usage of the Google App Engine SDK by providing more concise and more powerful shortcuts when using the datastore, memcache, the blobstore, the images service, the URL fetch service, when sending and receiving emails or Jabber messages, and much more. Gaelyk lets you define friendly REST-ful URLs thanks to its URL routing system Gaelyk provides a simple plugin system for improving code reuse and code sharing You can: download Gaelyk in the download area, learn how to create Gaelyk applications by reading the extensive tutorial, and participate in the community.

Last week I decided to challenge Scala's downscalability by trying to replace a Groovy script with a Scala pendant. In this article you will read about this little experiment and a comparision of the Scala result with the Groovy predecessor. But first some background about the script: Some time ago my company introduced a new spam notification system.  When it thinks that a mail contains spam, it keeps it in quarantine and once or twice a day sends an email to the recipient (me) reporting all the kept mails, together with an intranet web link for each  to release it. Here you see an example of such a mail (note: I have my mails displayed in plain text format):

"Clojure functional programming language for JVM has powerful mind-bending features. The feature that interests me the first time is its ability to "execute data as code". As demonstrated here, were I define a function process that basically executes the symbol processor with whatever params : => (defn process [& params] (eval (cons processor params))) #'user/process "

"OpenXava is a tool for Rapid Java Web Development, well-suited for business and database oriented applications. Write simple domain classes with Java or Groovy, and get an AJAX application ready for production. Since v4.2 OpenXava also produces iPad Web applications that behaves and looks like iPad native applications."

"A better way to build. Project automation is essential to the success of software projects. It should be straight-forward, easy and fun to implement. There is no one-size-fits-all process for builds. Therefore Gradle does not impose a rigid process over people. Yet we think finding and describing YOUR process is very important. And so, Gradle has the very best support for describing it. We don't believe in tools that save people from themselves. Gradle gives you all the freedom you need. Using Gradle you can create declarative, maintainable, concise and high-performance builds. "

"Developers usually have their programs write log and debug information to the standard output during coding and testing. This results in a lot of text being printed to Eclipse's console view, often more than can be easily surveyed. Since at any given time, only a small part of this information is of primary interest to the developer, a tool which highlights specific lines or words can significantly increase the readability of this output. Grep Console allows you to define a series of regular expressions which will be tested against the console output. Each expression matching a line will affect the style of either the entire line or parts of it. For example, error messages could be set to show up with a red background, or integer values showing the state of a certain variable could be rendered in bold font. "