By Guillaume LaForge

Groovy is a very popular alternative language for the JVM that continues to bring more developer productivity and more performance after each release. In this session, after a quick overview of the key features of Groovy 1.8, we'll dive through the new developments in the recently released Groovy 2.0.

After a quick look at the key features of Groovy 1.8, including more readable Domain­Specific Languages, concurrency capabilities with the GPars library, and built­ in JSON support, we'll dive right into the most important features of Groovy 2.0! A lot of the Groovy users are using the language as a Java scripting language, or sometimes as a better Java. First of all, not all of them need the dynamic capabilities, nor do they need all the library improvements provided by Groovy. For the latter, Groovy becomes more modular with smaller core modules that you can compose. For the former, in addition to its usual dynamic features, Groovy 2.0 adds static type checking, allowing you to ensure the correctness of your code before it ships and quickly spot early errors at compile time. Also, not everybody needs dynamic features at all times, and the natural extension to static type checking is static compilation. With static compilation, Groovy 2.0 generates fast and performant bytecode like Java, and shields key parts of your code base from possible interferences of dynamic features, making critical paths both faster and immune to monkey patching. But when you need fast and performant dynamic logic, Groovy 2.0 also features the integration of the "invoke dynamic" support coming up with JDK 7 and beyond.

By Guillaume LaForge

In this presentation, Guillaume, Paul, and Andrew will show you how to leverage Groovy to build a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) used to control a rover on Mars! Various metaprogramming techniques and integration mechanisms will be demonstrated. But the language itself is only the first part of the story. Developers cannot be expected to properly use a DSL without first-class IDE support and documentation.

The presentation will start by building the DSL from scratch, using the power of Groovy to create a concise and readable mini-language, and showing how to secure its integration. The second part of the presentation will demonstrate how to integrate the DSL into Groovy-Eclipse with custom content assist, navigation, searching, and inline documentation.