groovy VS Spock

This time, I visited Groovy. Given my biased first impression about Java and the JVM, I wasn't too exited! But I couldn't have been more wrong! 😁

The default programming language is Kotlin instead of Java. Also, Build configuration language is nowadays Kotlin DSL (build.gradle.kts) instead of Groovy DSL (build.gradle), the past default.

There are languages that are more like "script versions of java", lately including java itself - you can run simple .java stuff directly with a shebang line now - but things like Beanshell of yore and Groovy are far more java-like than javascript.

Install Groovy: To use Groovy, you'll need to first install it. You can find the installation instructions on the Groovy website (https://groovy-lang.org/)

On https://groovy-lang.org a lot of big companies are listed which use(d) Groovy. Is this still current? E.g. Netflix, ...

Groovylang

Hence, Groovy

If you want the power of JAVA but the feel of PYTHON, try Groovy (https://groovy-lang.org/) . Basically a scripting lang for JVM but can be dynamically/statically compiled and is 100% compatible with all JAVA libs but looks like Python

Doesn't Groovy (https://groovy-lang.org) achieve much of this? I remember being taught with it at university for some time before they introduced Java. With Groovy you don't need the class or main method, and can have a program which is just `println "Hello world!"`.

Well I care a lot that it exists. And many other people I know do as well. Just because you don't seem to like it, you shouldn't imagine everyone else is like you.

Maybe Grails is no longer used as much (like Rails itself), but Groovy found other usages since then, like https://spockframework.org/ and Jenkins pipelines (https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/syntax/). It's not going anywhere, and I see no reason for anyone to be upset about it.

In my opinion it is Spock for Java/Groovy [1]. The amount of functionality and readability you can squeeze from Groovy's DSLesque is absurd. Is basically a full fledged new test language with Java sprinkled as the test contents code

[1]: https://spockframework.org/

Groovy allows you to perform transforms on it's AST. If you look at the Spock framework, they used AST transforms to pull off a lot of the DSL.

Spock and Cucumber exemplify the philosophy of behavior-driven development (BDD). The principle behind BDD is that you must first define the desired result of the added feature in a subject-oriented language before writing any tests. The developers are then given the final documentation.

As a quick demonstration, the following (Spock) test asserts that the client JVM code fails to create an SSL connection with the service. Note that I chose to use Vert.x Web Client to handle interacting with the service, but don't let this decision distract from the core content of this post. Nevertheless, if you haven't used Vert.x, I encourage you to try it out -- especially for building server-side network applications.

I maintain a batterie of libraries for my company. Managing dependencies is one of the hardest part even with internal only libraries. Our major pain-point is the dependency towards 3rd party software and dealing with semver. Semver is not really hard to understand it’s just hard to execute as the developer is executing the rules. So for instance if I create a library/plugin etc which wraps around the a tool, would it be a breaking change when the software stops supporting a specific version of the wrapped tool even though the internal API stayed the same (this happens a lot for me with gradle plugins which suddenly decide to not being compatible with the version of gradle I use). I would say yes but for larger dependency trees this becomes a nightmare. For our internal unity3d libraries we decided to not count the supported Unity versions as part of the semver version. The other option would be to have special library packages for each version of unity similar to how the Spock testing framework[1] deals with groovy. For this option we don’t have enough engineers at my company.

[1] https://github.com/spockframework/spock