Groovy in the real world

[Jim Jarrett]

So I've heard tons about Groovy and Ruby (and Grails/RoR) as fast, agile, lightweight ways to get apps up and running quickly; I've gone thru the demos, and if you need CRUD, yes, they seem fast.

What I'm not seeing in example form is something "real" that shows how to use these tools to accomplish a real-world, less-contrived task.

Does

Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java

give that? If not, any pointers where to look?

[Dave Klein]

Groovy Recipes has a chapter on creating RESTful web services with Grails which includes sections on RSS and Atom feed and even rendering an Excel spreadsheet. Also on the Grails website you can find a list of real world production applications done in Grails. Grails Success Stories Some of them even have source code you can look at. One more example is Glen Smith's GRAVL blogging engine written in Grails (source available) You can find a link to it here as well as see it in action Glen Smith's Blog

[S Davis]

I guess that it depends on your definition of "real world", doesn't it? (wink)

In my book GIS for Web Developers, I devote an entire chapter to a real-world scenario. We download a CSV file of US Universities. We then use Groovy to walk through the file line by line, pulling out the fields we need, make RESTful WS calls to a geocoder to get lat/lon points for our street addresses, and finally create SQL statements to insert each row into a database. All that in less than 200 lines of code.

So part of my "real world" usage of Groovy involves scrubbing data, staging databases, walking through XML files, CSV, log files, etc.

But I also use it on the enterprise side of things. AboutGroovy has been up and running on Grails since Dec 2006. All of my client engagements have been writing Groovy and Grails for the past two years -- ranging from major mapping application (ala Google Maps) to more traditional database skinning. Before that, I worked for a company that had over 100k lines of Groovy that offered Enterprise/Open Source support for Fortune 100 companies. Mutual of Omaha (a very conservative insurance company) has over 50k lines of Groovy code in production -- not in the periphery, but right in the middle of the actuarial department.

Oracle, Sun, IBM, SAP, JBoss have all announced Groovy support in their products.

Your question was a good one -- Groovy is anything but a marginal "toy" language.