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

Adding transparent imports to a script


In this recipe, we will learn how to transparently add one or more import statements to a Groovy script.

Why is this feature significant? For a start, it reduces the amount of code required to use a library. But above all, it may be the first step in building your own DSL as it helps to remove friction. This is because your DSL users don't have to write any import statements. The ImportCustomizer class allows the following import variants:

  • Class imports, optionally aliased

  • Star imports

  • Static imports, optionally aliased

  • Static star imports

Getting ready

For the sake of demonstration, we will create a script that requires some classes from the amazing Google Guava library. Additionally, we will also need to statically import a groovy.json.JsonOutput utility class, which is indisputably a very fine collection of the utility methods for JSON printing. A script that wishes to use the classes mentioned previously would start with the following import statements...