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Groovy: The road map for the popular JVM language

Project leads Guillaume Laforge and Graeme Rocher envision the future of Groovy and Grails

By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, 09/25/12

Page 2 of 2

There's also another aspect related to the JDK and especially the Java Virtual Machine, which is the support of invokedynamic. Invokedynamic is a new bytecode instruction at the JVM level as well as a set of APIs, which have been created especially for the support of dynamic languages.

The last thing is about modularity: We made Groovy more modular.

InfoWorld: What improvements are going to be in Groovy in the future?

Laforge: In Groovy 2.1, we will be finishing work around invokedynamic support to completely use all the aspects of the invokedynamic bytecode instruction as well as the various APIs to further improve the performance of all the dynamic aspects of the language. We are also going to continue improving the support at the language level. It's going to be available in a couple of months or so, definitely before the end of the year.

InfoWorld: What is going to be in Groovy 3.0, and when would that be out?

Laforge: Groovy 3.0 will be released in probably about a year. We are going to rework the dynamic core of Groovy to completely review and rework the APIs, which are used for all the dynamic aspects of the language to further benefit from the invokedynamic support and to bring Groovy forward in the next phase. Also, we are bootstrapping Groovy by writing more of Groovy in Groovy.

InfoWorld: I was looking at a news article from about 2008 that raised the notion of Groovy overtaking Java on the Java Virtual Machine. Do you see that ever happening?

Laforge: Java will stay the dominant language on the JVM platform. That's my view, at least.

InfoWorld: What's the future for Grails?

Rocher: We are working on the 2.x chain of releases for Grails. At the end of last year, we released Grails 2, which is a pretty significant release, incorporating a new systems API. A couple months ago, we released 2.1, which adds integration with the Maven build tool. And then we're about to put out the release candidate for 2.2, in which you can embed different Grails applications within another application.

We're looking at Grails 3 into next year, which we're planning on moving to Gradle as the build system and implementing more advanced support for Web services to better support the creation of single-page Web applications

This story, "Groovy: The road map for the popular JVM language," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in programming at InfoWorld.com. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.