Groovy Visions (Gavin Grover)
Groovy Grails March 30th, 2008
On the day before April Fools’ Day, Gavin Grover worries about the following. Bless his heart, the worry is so severe that it appears to be an April Fool’s joke, but it is not. Graeme Rocher and others address the concern in the Comments.
Closures for the JVM
James Strachan had a vision: he wondered why the Java platform couldn’t have closures. So he began building Groovy, announcing it on 29 August 2003. He attracted others with a similar vision, such as Geir Magnusson and Richard Monson-Haefel, and together they lodged Groovy as a JSR on 16 March 2004. This attracted the attention of Sun Microsystems, as also did Microsoft putting closures into C#. So the long tentative process of putting closures into Java 7 began. The prototypes have been built, and we all await the final decision. Perhaps it will be announced at the upcoming JavaOne 2008 conference.
Groovy for Grails
Guillaume Laforge had a vision: he wondered why a Rails-like web framework couldn’t be written in Java. It would run faster than the Ruby-based Rails, but would need a dynamic language to configure it. So he took control of Groovy from James, and along with fellow despots Graeme Rocher, Jochen Theodorou, and Jeremy Rayner, started building Grails and putting a MOP into Groovy. A year ago at JavaOne 2007, according to Guillaume, was the genesis of G2One, Inc, where investors Bay Partners and executive Alex Tkachman joined them in the vision, enabling them to work full-time on building and marketing Groovy and Grails.
If it weren’t for Guillaume’s vision, Groovy would have died after it fulfilled its usefulness in James’ vision. However, because it’s so closely tied into the vision for Grails, Groovy may again die when it’s fulfilled its usefulness in Guillaume’s vision. G2One, Inc is a vehicle to quickly realize capital gains on perceived future income, calculated from present income and its growth rate. Consulting and training in Grails can generate huge earnings quickly, as Ruby on Rails has done, while Groovy’s present purpose is to make it as easy as possible for Java developers to use Grails. There’s no financial incentive to make it do anything more, and the majority votes of G2One shareholders indirectly control the majority decisions of the Groovy despotry.
Bringing in Newbies
On 29 August 2003, the same day James Strachan announced Groovy, I flew from Hong Kong to Wuhan China to begin my very first teaching job, leaving behind a programming career. While here, I’ve also developed a vision for Groovy. I’ve wondered why Groovy can’t appeal to non-Java and new programmers, as well as those already on the Java platform. It may not appeal to Python or Ruby programmers, but what about to Perl, PHP, or VB programmers? I’ve wondered what else Groovy needs to bring newbies to the Java platform, begun on extensive documentation for them, and attempted stuff like Unicode name-aliasing and Lisp-style self-referentiality.
However, my vision for Groovy is longer term than G2One Inc’s horizon for profiting from Grails, and may even be at odds with it. I heard that at Groovy DevCon4 in October last year some Groovy developers wanted to rename the Groovy Language after version 1.5 to shake me off. I figure if they decided to do it, it’ll be in time for JavaOne 2008 next month, so I’ve set up GroovyScript just in case. If the Groovy developers rename Groovy 1.6 to the Grails Language or whatever else they might call it, I’ll bundle it in GroovyScript just to keep Groovy’s groovy name alive. I’ll fight harder to keep the Groovy brand alive than James Strachan did.
But I’m hoping the Groovy developers made the right decision last year at the DevCon.
Comments:
Tags: Groovy Grails
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About
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Graeme Rocher
CTO
G2One Inc
First off, Guillaume or anybody else didn’t really have an “great vision” about creating Grails with the aim of creating a company around it. There was a post on a mailing list which got me working on the project because I had a genuine technical need for such a framework at the company I was working at at the time. There was no premeditated plan to create a company at this point.
Guillaume’s vision came in keeping the Groovy project alive which he has done superbly. Also, the Groovy team didn’t “put a MOP into Groovy” in order to create Grails.
Groovy already had a MOP long before Grails started otherwise Grails wouldn’t have been technically possible. What Grails did is contribute a nicer interface to the MOP with ExpandoMetaClass.
When Grails became very popular and helped further drive Groovy’s popularity it was a pleasant surprise to all of us and justification that what we were doing was right. The fact that an investor offered to get involved came as a huge surprise to us all and has enabled G2One Inc to be born.
G2One Inc now provids multiple full time resources to both the Groovy and the Grails projects, which has resulted in Groovy getting stronger, but there has never been a case where the Grails project dictates where Groovy goes. Guillaume is too strong minded for that!
Finally, I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from, but there have never been any plans to rename Groovy. We even named the company G(Groovy+Grails)One Inc after the names of the projects it would make little sense to rename them now.
Groovy is a great dynamic language that got me interested in programming after a few years out of it, although I was initially attracted to it because of its groovy name. I’m certainly benefiting from the great work Guillaume, you, Jochen, and all the developers are putting into it, and hope to get more involved myself in the future as I increase in skills. Thought it looks like I’ve inferred some incorrect cause-and-effect on the developers’ intentions from my years reading the Groovy mailing lists.
I’ll continue with my vision to make Groovy appealing to newbies to the Java platform: a groovy technology with a groovy name.