Groovy and why I want to use it more

Like I said in my previous post, Groovy is something which I am trying out. It's a nifty scripting language which runs on the JVM. I figured since I work with Java and need to meet my goal of one new language this year, it would be a good start. I needed a script to automate some file parsing, which would save me perhaps 10 minutes of copy-paste hell and I figured I would use Groovy. It was pretty impressive.

Parsing a text file in Java can be very difficult. Its one of the first things you are taught to do with Java. And it is not simple. Here's a simple snippet which would read a file from java and print out each line from the file:

package javaapplication2;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.DataInputStream;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;

public class Main {

public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException, IOException {
FileInputStream fstream = new FileInputStream("/home/umesh/febsec.txt");
DataInputStream in = new DataInputStream(fstream);
String strLine;
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(in));
while ((strLine = br.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println (strLine);
}
}
}

Here's the same piece of code written in Groovy.

package javaapplication2

new File("/home/umesh/febsec.txt").eachLine {println it}

I am sure I gloss over some things, which make Java robust and all that good stuff. But that's the essence - simple and dynamic. Of course, no typing is also good.

The learning curve for me was minimal - I spent some time reading about Groovy, courtesy Google and no I don't Bing. I had a parser to write and I was able to cobble it together within the 2 hours. What astounded me were 2 things which I never get to do easily with Java:

• Having class files without all that overhead of imports and packages - just so you know,my original script has no package line. I am not sure how this all works, but I am going to find out, because this simple thing means I get to write command line apps in Java with very little overhead and lots of Groovy magic.
• Closures - I never quite understood what closures meant. It's difficult to treat functions as first class objects. But this example definitely got me interested. Much has been written about closures, which I won't repeat, suffice to say they are pretty powerful and compact.

So two simple things have gotten me interested and I hope to use Groovy more. There is of course more to Groovy and my example is at best elementary-grade. Time to put my deerstalker cap on and examine the Groovy SDK.

What can I do with it? I am not sure. I don't want to fall into the 'there are so many things to do, I'm sure I will find one' hole. Been there too many times. This is not to say I believe Groovy can solve every problem. It has its own set of vulnerabilities. And I definitely do not like the idea of having a dynamic language handle ,say, financial transactions. But since I know Java, using this as my primary scripting tool should make automation a breeze.