Notes from TheServerSide Java Symposium March 2009
Scott Davis was the perfect presenter for the deadly “after lunch” session period. Interesting that his Groovy introduction is in a breakout room rather than the main ballroom, and there is not an empty seat in the house. Everyone is fascinated by these new powerful JVM languages, including me.
Scott started by asking who was a Java programmer in the house, a silly question at a Java symposium. He followed by asking who were Groovy programmers, and two or three hands went up. Followed by “Aha! Just by adding one JAR file to your classpath, you’re all Groovy programmers too.”
He immediately quit using slides, and went directly to live coding. Fabulous for a software talk! He started with a one-line “Hello, World” and then moved on to show off Groovy’s object and dynamic type features.
He’s using javap to explore groovy-created class files and show how the underpinnings relate directly to the Java infrastructure.
Admittedly, these powerful JVM languages are very seductive. They call them scripting languages, and yes, they’re great for scripting. But full powerful languages like Groovy, Scala, JRuby, Jython, and even JavaFX have enormous potential. I’m being torn in about five directions for new projects.