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You can use groovy in different ways - for scripting, Grails, quick prototyping, creation of DSLs etc.
But I like Groovy first of all as "better Java". Really, look - almost every Java code is valid Groovy code, i.e. - if you do not remember how to do something in a groovy way, you can write Java code in a Groovy class, but if you remember - use closures, Groovy lists, and many other nice features
The only thing, that does not allow me to use Groovy in a production code instead Java - is the lack of compilation time errors in many cases - calling to non existing methods or variable, etc.
Many Groovy frameworks is using this (see, for example
Groovy XML handling ), but if I'm writing regular code, I want to see here compilation errors.
Finally, Groovy 2.0 provides a feature of strict compilation time checking.
Let's take such class:
Let's take such class:
It passes a compilation w/o any problem.
But if we will add @TypeChecked (this annotation may be used for a class or a method), we will receive compilation errors:
This type checking is turned on automatically also if we are turning on static compilation for the class, using annotation @CompileStatic:
So now I can use Groovy for production code, instead of Java!
Full list of compile time messages for @TypeChecked you can see
here.
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