Chapter 2. The Groovy essentials

This chapter covers

  • Basics of the Groovy language
  • Differences between Java and Groovy
  • Groovy’s power features

As you saw in chapter 1, you can get a Grails application running in no time. You can even take the principles you learned in that chapter to add extra features. But if you want to develop something more complex, such as the Twitter-clone we use as the example project in this book, you’ll need to have a good grasp of the Groovy language.

Groovy is a dynamic, object-oriented language with a Java-like syntax. Furthermore, it integrates well with Java and the Java ecosystem: it runs on the JVM and uses JAR files for libraries. Java classes can depend on Groovy classes and vice versa. It’s also fun! ...

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