Groovy Interview Questions and FAQs – 1
What is Groovy?
Groovy is a powerful high level language for the Java platform which compiles down to Java bytecode.
Think of it as a Ruby or Python like language that is tightly integrated with the Java platform – allowing you the same powerful and concise coding syntax as Ruby or Pyton but allowing you to stay on the JVM and protect your investment in J2SE, J2EE and all the plethora of great useful Java code out there.
Why Groovy? Why don’t you just use Jython, JRuby, bsh, rhino, pnuts, …
Firstly ports of existing languages like Python, Ruby, Smalltalk and JavaScript to the JVM are a good thing and we welcome them. If you already use and/or are fond of these languages please be our guests to use the Java-port of them.One of the main design goals of Groovy is to be a scripting language for Java developers to use. So we wanted to reuse both Java’s semantics and the whole set of J2SE APIs rather than introduce a port of a different language with different semantics and APIs to learn and implement/maintain.
e.g. in Groovy, java.lang.Object is the root of the object hierarchy, Object.equals(), Object.hashCode() and Comparable are used for comparions and lookups of objects, that java.util.List and java.util.Map are used for collections, Java Beans are fully supported and that Java and Groovy classes are interchangable inside the VM. Groovy is built on top of the J2SE APIs, rather than having 2 parallel platforms etc.
In other words we wanted the Groovy language to be very easy to pick up if you’re already a Java developer and for there to be a very small number of new APIs to learn. By this statement we’re not implying that Python / Ruby / JavaScript are hard to learn per se – its just there’s more to know, things are more different and there’s more APIs to learn
Think of Groovy as a Ruby or Python like language that is tightly integrated with the Java platform (as opposed to the Unix/Posix command shell and C-libraries) – allowing you the same powerful and concise coding syntax as Ruby or Pyton but allowing you to stay on the JVM and protect your investment in J2SE, J2EE and all the plethora of great useful Java code out there without any adapter layers or parallel API sets etc. There is a more detailed set of comparisio ther languages here
What are the dependencies for Groovy?
As well as Java 1.4 and the Groovy jar we also depend at runtime on the ASM library.
What is the licence for Groovy?
Groovy is open source using a BSD / Apache style licence
I get errors when trying to run groovy, groovysh or groovyConsole. Whats wrong?
Groovy depends on JDK 1.4 or later. Common errors people have when trying to run Groovy is that there’s an old groovy jar on the CLASSPATH somewhere (have you checked in java/lib/ext?) or that JAVA_HOME points to an old JDK before JDK 1. For more help please see this description of running Groovy code.
How can I add stuff to the classpath when running things in groovysh or groovy?
You can add things to your $CLASSPATH environment variable. Another popular option is to create a .groovy/lib directory in your home directory and add whatever jars you want to be available by default. e.g. if you wish to connect to your favourite JDBC database and do some scripting with it then add your JDBC driver to ~/.groovy/lib.
Things work if I use Suns conventions and put { on the same line, but if I add a new line things break?
When using closures with method calls we have some syntax sugar in Groovy which is sensitive to white space (newlines to be precise). Please see this description in common gotchas for a full description.
