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 a functionality to the existing Java/Groovy classes


How many times have you dreamed of adding a new method to a final class or to a class that you don't even have sources for? With Groovy, you are given the ability to do so. That's all possible thanks to Groovy's extension methods. The original class stays untouched and Groovy takes care of catching extended method calls.

In fact, we have already seen examples of this feature in some of the recipes in Chapter 2, Using Groovy Ecosystem, for example, the Using Java classes from Groovy and Embedding Groovy into Java recipes, and we'll see more in coming recipes of this book. Groovy extends many of the standard JDK classes (for example, java.io.File, java.lang.String, java.util.Collection, and so on). It's one of the many cool Groovy features that makes working with some old Java APIs a pleasant business.

In this recipe, we are going to cover the mechanism of creating an extension module to an existing Java class, and then using that class...