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

Running tasks in parallel and asynchronously


One of the recurring problems that a developer has to face when working on integrating with external systems, is how to deal with sluggish response time.

Very often, a slow response time from a system, out of our control, ends up negatively affecting the user experience of a web application that feeds on the data coming from the slow system.

The first line of defense against such services is adding a caching layer. A cache helps to mitigate the effects of unreliable external systems, but it is not always the definitive cure. Depending on the business domain, a cache may have a large ratio of cache miss (occurs when a specific data is not found in the cache). Furthermore, on large systems caches can take time to warm up.

So, the second weapon in a developer arsenal against sleepy services, is using asynchronous calls. An asynchronous call is a non-blocking call to a method. A separate thread runs the method and returns the result whenever it is ready...