Thursday, January 24, 2008

Groovy: Traffic Doubled with a Formal Release

A few days ago we loaded the Groovy lists and their 70,000 messages. The list traffic chart helped change my mind about the language.

The groovy project calls itself, "an agile and dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine". I'd call it a cool scripting language that compiles to Java bytecodes and so lets you write in a scripting language while accessing the vast set of Java libraries out there.

The first time I saw Groovy, years back, I got very excited -- but then it didn't seem to be catching on, and I thought it was slowly on the downturn. In fact it's not like that at all, it just takes time to develop a language. Look at the shape of the message traffic histogram:


Looks like the project caught some fire. Guillaume Laforge blogged that the big jump you see here starting in January 2007 was due to the release of Groovy 1.0. I see they're on Groovy 1.5 now, as of a month ago. The 100+ messages per day rate will probably continue. My friend Scott Davis was right.

2 comments:

Scott Davis said...

As a Java developer, Groovy has really been a show-changer for me. It allows me to take advantage of a mature, well-understood, ubiquitous deployment platform while leveraging modern advances in programming. If you're not tied to the JVM, there are plenty of exciting new languages out there, but if you want seamless interop with Java, I'm hard pressed to think of a better solution than Groovy. Thanks for putting together MarkMail, BTW -- the UI is killer.

Jim Shingler said...

I would go as far to say that it is a "Better Java"