NFJS: Groovy and Java

[The continuing story of my first No Fluff Just Stuff experience]

Next up at my first "No Fluff Just Stuff" experience was a talk by Scott Davis entitled Groovy and Java: The Integration Story. I was really looking forward to this session because I've been using Groovy lately for simple scripting tasks, and I wanted to see how the language could be used with Java in a true enterprise application. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.

The good things about the session were Scott's comments on the Groovy and Java compilers, and how circular references can come into play when Groovy and Java code are mixed. He gave the following set of Best Practice recommendations when using the languages together:

• Group classes by language and tier
• Write interfaces in Java
• Write implementations in either Groovy or Java

I also liked the recommendation of using Groovy for unit tests as a way to bring the language into a shop that is heavily invested in the Java enterprise solution. Jason Rudolph had actually recommended this practice when we worked together, but it was good to hear it again. I only wish that Scott had provided some good examples of this practice.

This brings me to the things that made this session a disappointment.

First of all, I felt he spent a little too much time upfront talking about basic things like downloading Groovy and how to use a Unix softlink to maintain multiple versions on your machine. This is a trick that has been around for quite some time, but he seemed to think he was imparting some hidden Groovy secret.

Other basic Groovyisms that seemed out of place for this session were things like explaining the println() shortcut for Java's System.out.println(), and how the last line in a method is an implicit return statement. These are things that should be covered in a Groovy introduction session.

Scott then went into an array of different topics that seemed to be disjoint. He talked a little about code coverage with Cobertura, Spring, and Ant, all of which were good topics, but not for what I was expecting.

Overall I thought that the session was a mashup of different topics that only had a cursory relationship to Java and Groovy working together. Maybe my expectations about the integration of these two languages is different from what others believe. In the session later in the weekend on Drools, I saw Java and Groovy working together in a rules-based system. That's the type of thing I wanted to see in Scott's session.

A word about the speaker. Scott Davis was arguably the best pure speaker at the symposium. He has a very appealing style for this type of event - he is knowledgeable and his presentations are fun. He has so much enthusiasm that he bounces across the stage at times keeping the attendees on their toes and entertained. The rhythm of his speaking style matches this buoyant choreography.

Next up: What is OSGi?