John Travis writes on TheServerSide.com:

Our application comes from legacy frameworks — J2EE session / entity beans, struts, JBoss MDBs, etc.

This means that our core backend API has typically not been attractive to developers — something that’s very important to anyone wanting to tweak, script, or integrate their monitoring application with the rest of their environment (aka every sysadmin).

So what does Groovy do for us? By using Categories and MetaClasses, HQU is able to provide an API that is easy to read, easy to write, and behaves in an obvious way. Of course it does not provide a 100% replacement for our backend APIs, which is another great reason to use Groovy — it seamlessly interacts with the rest of our Java app.

Groovy also makes development infinitely easier. Since we’re able to develop features, test HQL queries, etc. inside of a _running_ application, the time between code-revs is very quick (hit reload. Done.)

We have made a commitment to Groovy and will be using it more and more in subsequent releases. The release of the HQU framework means that the community now has more hooks than ever into a powerful infrastructure management application to create custom, centralized screens, specific to their environment.

Tags: Groovy Grails, SpringSource