A Pragmatic look at the Groovy-ness of Groovy

So, now that I've been familiar with Groovy for a while, I figured that I would post a blog about my opinions of it from a pragmatic perspective.

First off, I think that Groovy is an awesome language, and development in it allows code to be much more streamlined, and it is wonderful to finally be able to give up on some of the nuisances of Java. My favorite part is the ?, but I also enjoy only writing try-catches when I actually intend to catch an Exception, not writing getters and setters, and the metaClass ability is like finding a superpower. However, life is not all good in Groovy-land.

There is another tool in my development arsenal that is at least as powerful as Groovy, and which also enhances my development speed. This tool is code complete. Unfortunately, these two tools are currently mutually exclusive. I know that Groovy is dynamic, but when I specifically set a variable type declaration, you would think that my IDE should at least be able to kick into Java mode and tell me what the methods of String are without me having to type them manually or look up the oft-forgotten ones in the JDK. But lo and behold, it appears that none of the IDEs have found a way around this hicup yet.

The grand conclusion! Again - I like Groovy. But in a real world environment, before I develop a new class, I have to look at which tool will help me develop my code faster and maintain it more easily in the long run. So far, it appears that the main purpose of Groovy in my life will be to writing very brief classes, writing unit tests, and working with XML. Hopefully my IDEs will develop, and I'll be able to use both of these tools at the same time sometime in the near future.