Slashdot Mirror
Google App Engine Adds Java Support, Groovy Meta-Programming
Zarf writes "Yesterday Google announced that the Google App Engine now supports Java development, and fast on the heels of the Java announcement is an announcement for Groovy support! Groovy is a dynamic programming language for the JVM that is a near super-set of Java. Much Java syntax is valid Groovy syntax, however, Groovy adds powerful meta-programming features, and the new functionality will bring these meta-programming features to App Engine development. Groovy got special attention from the SpringSource Groovy team and the Google App Engine Java team, and it was this collaboration that helped create the changes that were the big secret in the recent Groovy release of 1.6.1."
Reading TFA, it looks like a scalable servlet container. No J2EE as far as I can tell.
Well, it's biggest advantage is that it is a language written to run on the JVM*. You can talk to Java classes when you need to, but it's really a dynamic language that Java developers can easily learn and use. Type can be strong or weak depending on what you want/need, you can write Groovy unit tests against Java code, etc.
*of course there's Jython, but Groovy was designed from the ground up to be used by Java developers.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Incorrect. The Servlet platform imposes those restrictions already, with the container handling all the messy details of threading and networking. It works just fine in 90%+ of the cases.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Dynamic languages are gaining popularity extremely fast for a whole host of reasons. If you haven't used a dynamic language then you probably won't understand why they are attractive very easily, but if you have it will probably seem obvious. They do have a lot of downsides and I think the jury is still out to some extent whether the reams of code now being written in them is going to be maintainable down the track.
Groovy is Java made into a dynamic language and with innumerable convenience features added. The best way to describe it is to imagine if java was turned into Ruby.
I suspect one reason Google has focused on it is because of Grails, which is java's main player in the RAD web-app development arena (more or less the equivalent of Django, which they also support for the Python app engine). It doesn't work on App Engine yet, but I strongly suspect that is where they are headed.