Technoetic

This weekend I attended the Groovy and Grails Experience (2GX) conference. I had done some Groovy scripting and had played with Grails a little. However, this was a good chance to dive into some more advanced topics like Groovy metaprogramming and Grail’s GORM.

My favorite talk was Glen Smith’s overview of Grails plugins for Rich UI support, search, Ajax and more. It was a very informative and fun presentation.

The speaker’s panel discussion was one of the best I’ve seen. One of the most controversial questions was about Groovy, JRuby and the relative impedance mismatch with the Java Platform. Neil Ford of Thoughtworks initially took the position that there was no impedance mismatch with JRuby. Graeme Rocher and others listed numerous examples of where JRuby was less integrated with Java compared to Groovy. Graeme commented that although JRuby can access compiled Java classes, it is much more difficult (impossible?) for Java to use JRuby classes. Groovy classes are Java classes and so they can be used relatively transparently in Java programs.

Speaking from experience, I’ve tried to use Java libraries (QuickFIX/J) using JRuby and it has proven much more difficult than with Groovy. One issue was insufficient (and somewhat outdated) documentation about how to integrate JRuby with Java classes outside the “java.*” packages. This was a few months ago so maybe the documentation has improved. However, with Groovy I was able to use the Java libraries within a few minutes.

I agreed with a point that Neil made that having some competition in the JVM dynamic language arena helps everyone. I highly respect the work the JRuby team is doing although I believe that Groovy is a better and more pragmatic dynamic language choice for Java developers.