Let's get started

Even though I put a little blurb about the blog on the side, I figured I would still get started with a blog introduction. As a java programmer over the past few years, I have started dabbling with Groovy (and Grails as well, though less due to my lesser focus on GUI) and have looked for any possible reason to write tools in groovy. That is the reason I added it to the name of the blog as I figure at this point in time, my posts will probably gravitate more to the groovy world, so why not use the double meaning in the name.

A colleague of mine has commented that documentation of groovy is lacking. I think the problem is that many of the examples are simplistic, and for us java programmers what we are looking to learn is "what is the groovy way of doing things" and the ideas are not easily expanded to a more complex problem. This is further exacerbated by it being a scripting language, so the code complete will usually not provide the answers. Instead you will be looking around to try to figure out "what are the parameters i get in this closure?" or similar issues.

I find that i actually burn a lot of time on this, so developing in groovy has been slow, as my goal not to see Java code with a .groovy extension. In the end, i am usually quite satisfied with the results and am impressed with the readibility of this more concise code. And of course the next time i need to something it goes MUCH faster and it quite elegant!

So, i figured i would try to give back and help out with some of what i have done, providing the perspective of a relative newcomer to Groovy.

Hope you enjoy.