Java Reference
In-Depth Information
integration is more deeply embedded and will provide capabilities far beyond what Java
alone includes. In all of them, the productivity gains will hopefully be both obvious and
dramatic.
1.4. Summary
Java is a large, powerful language, but it's showing its age. Decisions made early in its de-
velopment are not necessarily appropriate now, and over time it has accumulated problems
and inconsistencies. Still, Java is everywhere, and its tools, libraries, and infrastructure are
both useful and convenient.
In this chapter I reviewed some of the issues that are part of the Java development world,
from its verbosity to anonymous inner classes to static typing. Most Java developers are so
accustomed to these “problems” that they see them as features as much as bugs. Add a little
bit of Groovy, however, and the productivity gains can be considerable. I demonstrated that
simply using Groovy native collections and the methods Groovy adds to the standard Java
libraries reduced huge sections of code down to a few lines. I also listed the Groovy capab-
ilities that will be a rich source of ideas for simplifying Java development.
As powerful as Groovy is (and as fun as it is to use), I still don't recommend replacing your
existing Java with Groovy. In this topic I advocate a blended approach. The philosophy is
to use Java wherever it is appropriate, which mostly means using its tools and libraries and
deploying to its infrastructure. I add Groovy to Java wherever it helps the most. In the next
chapter I'll begin that journey by examining class-level integration of Java and Groovy.
