Book Image

Groovy 2 Cookbook

Book Image

Groovy 2 Cookbook

Overview of this book

Get up to speed with Groovy, a language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that integrates features of both object-oriented and functional programming. This book will show you the powerful features of Groovy 2 applied to real-world scenarios and how the dynamic nature of the language makes it very simple to tackle problems that would otherwise require hours or days of research and implementation. Groovy 2 Cookbook contains a vast number of recipes covering many facets of today's programming landscape. From language-specific topics such as closures and metaprogramming, to more advanced applications of Groovy flexibility such as DSL and testing techniques, this book gives you quick solutions to everyday problems. The recipes in this book start from the basics of installing Groovy and running your first scripts and continue with progressively more advanced examples that will help you to take advantage of the language's amazing features. Packed with hundreds of tried-and-true Groovy recipes, Groovy 2 Cookbook includes code segments covering many specialized APIs to work with files and collections, manipulate XML, work with REST services and JSON, create asynchronous tasks, and more. But Groovy does more than just ease traditional Java development: it brings modern programming features to the Java platform like closures, duck-typing, and metaprogramming. In this new book, you'll find code examples that you can use in your projects right away along with a discussion about how and why the solution works. Focusing on what's useful and tricky, Groovy 2 Cookbook offers a wealth of useful code for all Java and Groovy programmers, not just advanced practitioners.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Groovy 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Compiling Groovy code


Groovy scripts are normally executed by running the groovy command from the console; for example:

groovy someScript.groovy

The groovy command generates the JVM bytecode on the fly and immediately executes it. There are scenarios in which the Groovy code is required to be compiled to bytecode as a *.class file. A typical case is when Java and Groovy code have to be used side-by-side for building a mixed Groovy/Java application.

Groovy has an answer to that by offering a compiler command, groovyc (similarly to Java's javac), that can also be invoked from the command line or through a build tool such as Ant (see the Integrating Groovy into the build process using Ant recipe), Maven (see the Integrating Groovy into the build process using Maven recipe), or Gradle (see the Integrating Groovy into the build process using Gradle recipe).

In this recipe, we are going to show you the principal purposes of the groovyc command.

Getting ready

The best way to show the Groovy compiler...