The second edition of “Learning Groovy” (which covers Groovy 3.0 thus the name) is now available. After months of researching, writing, and editing, it has finally gone to print! I’m really excited to announce this and I hope it spreads the love of Groovy far and wide.

Groovy can be used as a dynamic or static language depending on your choice, however it’s hard to condense that into a short subtitle. We also wanted to include how it is closely related to Java, hence the subtitle, “Java-Based Dynamic Scripting.”

The twitter announcement is here. And the book itself can be…

I had the great privilege of leading a workshop and two talks at Gr8Conf EU 2019 in Copenhagen, Denmark. This was also my first time attending Gr8Conf EU (I did attend Gr8Conf US 2017). My life has finally quieted down enough now that I can write about my experience.

The conference was, in a word, great. I saw a few familiar faces, like Paul King, Jeff Scott Brown, Michael Carducci, Sergio del Amo Caballero, and Jeff Beck (all of whom I’ve seen before, mostly as just another audience member), and met some great new people whom I’ve never seen before…

I wrote this Groovy DSL for computing the percentage by weight of elements in compounds for a little project I’m doing and decided to share it. It also includes names of all elements in periodic table. It’s an example of using Groovy’s propertyMissing method and other features to create a domain specific language.

It’s covered in depth in my book, “Learning Groovy”

Originally published at adamldavis.com.

About two weeks ago I was privileged to create bundles with two other authors, including Modern Java Career Bootcamp and How to Craft Interpreters. (You might notice the minimum price is a famous number)

It contains four e-books that cover everything from Java 7 and 8 features, to programming a compiler, to details about profiling the JVM that could come in handy during an interview.

But aside from what you see, it’s useful to think about what you don’t see. You don’t see pictures of the authors on the covers. You don’t see the author names in huge print. You…

At its core, Ratpack enables asynchronous, stateless HTTP applications. It is built on Netty, the event-driven networking engine. Unlike many other web framework, there is no expectation that one thread handles one request. Instead, you are encouraged to handle blocking operations in a way that frees the current thread thus allowing high performance. (It has an implementation of Promise, and other classes to handle non-callback, asynchronous programming)

Ratpack can be used to make responsive, RESTful microservices, although it’s not a requirement.

Unlike Grails and other popular web frameworks, Ratpack aims not to be a framework, but instead a set of…

This was originally posted Feb, 2015

There’s a hot new programming language that I’m excited about. It can be used dynamically or statically-typed, your choice. It supports functional programming constructs, including first-class functions, currying, and more. It has multiple-inheritance, type inference, and meta-programming. It also integrates really well with a battle-tested enterprise-worthy language and best-of-class virtual machine.

This programming language actually isn’t that new. It’s from 2004, but they’ve recently added a lot of new features, such as traits. Oh, did I mention it has a great community and tons of frameworks built on top of it for web-applications, testing…