Andrew Binstock writes the “Integration Watch” column for SD Times and is a senior contributing editor at InfoWorld where he reviews middleware and enterprise software development tools. For the past 16 years, he has also been a judge for the Jolt awards. He wrote the following blog entry on Groovy’s traction after JavaOne 2007.

Java developers suddenly have a wealth of choices when it comes to dynamic languages that run on the JVM. There’s JavaFX, which Sun announced at JavaOne this year, and JRuby, which Sun expects to complete sometime this year, and then, of course, there’s my favorite: Groovy. Groovy makes writing Java programs far easier. It essentially takes Java and removes the syntactical cruft, leaving a neat language that makes you terrifically productive.

Because Groovy took a long time getting out of the gate, it’s taken some licks in the press. However, it’s clear that Java developers are catching on to its benefits. The JavaOne bookstore published its daily top-10 sales during the show. The picture on this post, shows the Day 2 list with two Groovy titles in the top 10 (at places 5 and 8). Overall, the Groovy bible, Groovy in Action, came in at number 5 for the show. Interest is definitely growing.

If you haven’t tried Groovy yourself, it’s definitely worth a look. Here are a couple of good overviews:

• The Groovy Getting Started Guide
• Andrew Glover’s Overview and Tutorial on DeveloperWorks

Dierk König followed up that:

Groovy in Action was #2 bestseller through day 3 of JavaOne and would have finished even better that #5 overall if it wouldn’t have been sold out by Thursday noon

Tags: Groovy