Summary
The last time I paid any attention to Groovy was when Mike Spille blogged about it, and when the Bile Blog chimed in (links below). Basically they wrote off the project (albeit giving lots of details about why). But recently the Java Posse talked about it in slightly different tones, so it made me start wondering.

Here is How Groovy Lost its Groove Thang posted by Mike Spille almost a year ago, and The groovy sinking ship posted on the Bile Blog (warning: foul language) a month before that. Both of these longish posts did a fairly serious analysis of the situation and decided that Groovy was toast.

Although the Java Posse was reasonably positive about Groovy, they did acknowledge that it had some problem areas -- syntax problems and obvious bugs that should have been caught before shipping -- and then they seemed to hedge a little. These were some of the same issues that the above articles talked about so I'm wondering if anything has really changed.

Is anyone actively using Groovy that might be able to give some insights? Or can you point to other articles or weblog entries?

The problem with projects that go awry is that it's rare that people actually announce that fact. It seems an issue with business in general -- we loudly announce our new projects and successes, but people tend to learn more from failures than they do from successes, and we tend to try to cover up our failures. Also, if a company is depending on a technology, it's rather important to know if the project has gone off the rails, but that's very hard to find out.

Then again, the fact that Java 6 is supposed to provide better support for dynamic languages may change the picture.

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About the Blogger

Bruce Eckel (www.BruceEckel.com) provides development assistance in Python with user interfaces in Flex. He is the author of Thinking in Java (Prentice-Hall, 1998, 2nd Edition, 2000, 3rd Edition, 2003, 4th Edition, 2005), the Hands-On Java Seminar CD ROM (available on the Web site), Thinking in C++ (PH 1995; 2nd edition 2000, Volume 2 with Chuck Allison, 2003), C++ Inside & Out (Osborne/McGraw-Hill 1993), among others. He's given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences.