Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4. Using Groovy features in Java
This chapter covers
• Basic code-level simplifications
• Useful AST transformations
• XML processing
In
chapter 1
I reviewed many of Java's arguable weaknesses and drawbacks and suggested
ways that Groovy might help ameliorate them. Because that chapter was intended to be in-
troductory I only suggested how Groovy can help, without showing a lot of code examples.
Now that I've established how easy it is to add Groovy classes to Java applications, when is
it helpful to do so? What features, if any, does Groovy bring to Java systems that make them
easier to develop?
A guide to the techniques covered in this chapter is shown in
figure 4.1
. I'll review several
Groovy advantages, like POGOs, operator overloading, the Groovy JDK, AST transform-
ations, and how to use Groovy to work with XML and JSON data. To start, I'll show that
from Groovy code POJOs can be treated as though they were POGOs.
Figure 4.1. Groovy features that can be added to Java classes
