Today I decided to start up a special interest group for Groovy and Grails developers in Sydney. If you are interested in Groovy or would like to be a presenter then please join up at Groovy Sydney. You can register your Groovy talk on the Presentation Topics page, and I will organise for you to present at the next meeting. The Groovy Sydney group will meet on a monthly basis at the ThoughtWorks office, followed by drinks at a nearby pub.

Groovy is a dynamic language that I have been ignoring until now for no particular reason. I first heard about it when I was doing consulting work in Brisbane last year. One of the client developers of a large bankasurance company gave a pretty good presentation on Groovy. But back then I was ignorant and caught up in the Ruby on Rails hype.

The thing about Groovy that won me over was that you can start off by writing your code in Java, and then refactor to make your code groovier. It reduces the learning curve required to be productive in a new programming language, which I believe to be quite novel.

Groovy makes sense in the enterprise as it allows you to leverage your existing Java based systems. You can deploy a Groovy application in your expensive J2EE application servers, therefore maximising your return on investment in infrastructure costs. For example, Grails — a Rails-esque web application framework for Groovy — can be deployed as part of a Spring application. Essentially you can implement a lot of your integration business logic in Java, and use Grails to quickly create frontend CRUD functionality, which is tedious to do in Spring alone. Groovy is a tool worth having for any Java developer looking for productivity gains.