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Groovy in Action (Paperback)

by Dierk Koenig (Author), Andrew Glover (Author), Paul King (Author), Guillaume Laforge (Author), Jon Skeet (Author)

4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

Paperback: 696 pages
Publisher: Manning Publications; illustrated edition edition (17 Jan 2007)
Language English
ISBN-10: 1932394842
ISBN-13: 978-1932394849
Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 18.5 x 3.6 cm

Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 121,622 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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#15 in	Books > Computing & Internet > Databases > Java & Databases
#20 in	Books > Computing & Internet > Programming > Languages > Java > Web Services
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Product Description

Groovy, the brand-new language for the Java platform, brings to Java many of the features that have made Ruby popular. Groovy in Action is a comprehensive guide to Groovy programming, introducing Java developers to the new dynamic features that Groovy provides. To bring you Groovy in Action, Manning again went to the source by working with a team of expert authors including both members and the Manager of the Groovy Project team. The result is the true definitive guide to the new Groovy language.

Groovy in Action introduces Groovy by example, presenting lots of reusable code while explaining the underlying concepts. Java developers new to Groovy find a smooth transition into the dynamic programming world. Groovy experts gain a solid reference that challenges them to explore Groovy deeply and creatively.

Because Groovy is so new, most readers will be learning it from scratch. Groovy in Action quickly moves through the Groovy basics, including:

Simple and collective Groovy data types

Working with Closures and Groovy Control Structures

Dynamic Object Orientation, Groovy style

Readers are presented with rich and detailed examples illustrating Groovy's enhancements to Java, including

How to Work with Builders and the GDK

Database programming with Groovy

Groovy in Action then demonstrates how to Integrate Groovy with XML, and provides,

Tips and Tricks

Unit Testing and Build Support

Groovy on Windows

An additional bonus is a chapter dedicated to Grails, the Groovy Web Application Framework.

Early PDF chapters of Groovy in Action are available from the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) at http://www.manning.com/koenig. As part of this program, readers can also discuss the early manuscript with the author and help shape the manuscript as it's being developed by joining the Author Forum.

About the Author

Dierk Koenig is a senior software developer, mentor and coach at Canoo Engineering AG, Basel, Switzerland. He writes for leading magazines on software development and speaks at international conferences. He joined the Groovy project as a committer in 2004.

Andrew Glover is the President of Stelligent Incorporated. He actively blogs about software quality at thediscoblog.com and testearly.com.

Dr Paul King is Managing Director and Principal Consultant for ASERT, has provided technical and strategic consulting to hundreds of organizations throughout the U.S. and Asia Pacific.

Guillaume Laforge is the official Groovy Project Manager and member of the JSR-241 Expert Group standardizing the Groovy Scripting Language. Guillaume is a software architect and Open Source consultant, working for OCTO Technology.

Jon Skeet is a software engineer and Groovy enthusiast who specializes in Java and C# development.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cracking stuff, 19 Jul 2007

By	Thing with a hook - See all my reviews

Whatever you think about the merits of Groovy as a language, a serious contender on the JVM, or a complete mess, you couldn't hope to find a better advocate for Groovy than this book.

One of the secrets of GinA's success is that it assumes the reader is already proficient with Java development, including Swing, Ant and JUnit. It would also help to know about XML, SQL, HTML, JSP and a vague idea of how MVC applies to web apps. You don't need to be an expert in these areas, though. If you've sufficient knowledge to decode the preceeding alphabet soup of initialisations, you'll be ok.

The reward for possessing this background knowledge is that GinA doesn't waste time with trivial examples, and barrels through Groovy the language in the first part, leveraging your existing knowledge of Java to highlight the important differences in Groovy. In particular, the advantages of interpolating strings, simple hash and array construction syntax, optional typing and metaprogramming are stressed. The big win in Groovy over Java is the use of closures and their used in a block-based approach to iteration, which is as well motivated here as the material in, say, The Pickaxe is for Ruby.

The second part of the book provides examples of the Groovy library. It begins with an excellent chapter on Groovy's Builders, which provide a very neat, uncluttered syntax for putting together hierarchical structures. An obvious application is XML, and by extension Ant scripts, which appears to have some major advantages compared to the challenging readability of vanilla Ant. Even more impressive is the SwingBuilder example, which builds a GUI with the minimum of fuss and a complete lack of anonymous inner classes.

Beyond the Builders, there are also compelling chapters on templating HTML and server side Groovy (Groovlets), writing DAOs and DTOs in Groovy to simplify database programming, and a chapter on XML, which even manages to find the space to introduce Groovy for SOAP, XML-RPC and REST web services.

The final part of the book describes some non-core libraries and other applications of Groovy. The chapter on Groovy extensions to JUnit is interesting, although perhaps this is one place where it assumes too little on behalf of the reader. I would have assumed that the average developer sufficiently motivated to pick up a book on Groovy knows enough about unit testing and JUnit that more space could have been given to the advanced topics. Particularly appealing is the idea of testing Java code with dynamically typed Groovy unit tests, which would make mocking and stubbing more palatable; I would have liked more on that subject.

Another noteworthy chapter is the last one, which introduces the web app framework Grails. This has a different style to the other chapters, being a dialogue between two of the authors as they build a simple app. This reader admits to finding it a little bit naff, but it does usefully demonstrate the grails way (which is a lot like Rails).

If you have the slightest interest in Groovy, alternatives to Java on the JVM, or dynamic languages, GinA makes the perfect case for Groovy as a first class integration language for all the bits of Java where you really wish you were working with something like Perl, Ruby or Python. It's well-written, with good examples, clear explanations, and it's relentlessly practical, never forgetting its target audience. It's all the more impressive given lead author Dierk Konig's comment in the preface that English is not his first language. Kudos to him and his co-authors for what they've delivered.

One can only wish that every language had its GinA. Outstanding.

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book for both old and new, 25 April 2007

By	B. Esbach - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The book is well presented, well written; moreover, the examples and instructions WORK. The authors have a very easy-going style, and you find yourself having a lot of fun (my favourite is the Grails example in the back, got me interested enough to rework a new project to use Grails+Groovy instead of my usual Delphi/PHP for web services).
The guys did an incredible job.

My only gripe (and the reason for the 4star rating); the Index is terrible.
Maybe it's just me, but if I'm looking for details on something specific (eg String Objects), I expect to get at least a bit of detail when I turn to the page identified in the index - instead of just finding the word String in italics on the page.
I'm not really familiar with how these things are done, but I would suggest fixing this in the next release of this book.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Thorough intro to Groovy. Highly recommended., 2 Jan 2009

By	Mr. Jeremy Flowers "Working on Grails portal" (Milton Keynes, UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

* The author makes use of assertions to convey how the code behaves which makes learning Groovy with a Java background quite easy.
* It helps if you've used Prototype or jQuery before for things like closures, but the book discusses this very thoroughly too.

Groovy is scripting language that gives Java an overhaul:
* A very terse language by comparison.
* Runs in JVM, so easy to migrate from Java.
* Will be interested in seeing how OSGi will impact Groovy/Grails, since it has it's own mechanism for classloading so Groovy can call Java code or vice-versa. Book made no mention of this.
* Returns to the Smalltalk concept where everything is an object.
* It is reminiscent of Prototype the Ajax library with the way it:
** uses closures for Event handling (no need for awkward inner classes),
** makes use of builders. Builders allow you to do things like write code for Swing GUI's that look reminiscent to JSON. IE: Nested structure of code mirrors nesting of components.
* Enhanced String manipulation. Templating capabilities reminiscent of Velocity/Freemarker or JSP with EL built in.
* Shows how to script conditional logic with Ant builds. No awkward Ant Contrib. Can code call either way. Groovy to Ant or Ant to Groovy. * Enhanced Reflection capabilities through meta object processing allowing duck typing.
** Would make an ideal language to write a code generator in.
* Has first rate handling of collections. SQL (No more boilerplate JDBC code opening & closing resources and doing exception handling. Similar to Springs JDBC template pattern).
* XML manipulation is a doddle compared to Java.
* Book also shows how to use Scriptom to directly manipulate COM objects. Some good food for thought here. But URL's are all broken. Needs to think about .NET these days. COM is like the dark ages... Have posted updates on Manning Forum.
* I agree with B. Esbach. Index is not that great. Was trying to find out what =~ was. If all the symbols were at start it would be better. Found some nested under operators. Had to know parent item to search on... No regex finder method though!

When you add Grails to the mix for doing web development it makes coding a snap. Very similar to AppFuse. Creates code off domain classes that can then be customised. Automates default code generation for prototyping (scaffolding) combining Spring & Hibernate under the covers.
* Shows how easy it is to generate test data too.

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