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

Constructing JSON messages with JsonBuilder


This recipe provides an overview of another class introduced in Groovy 1.8, which helps to construct JSON messages, the JsonBuilder.

This class works like any other builder class in Groovy (see the Defining data structures as code in Groovy recipe from Chapter 3, Using Groovy Language Features). A data structure based on Lists and Maps is defined, and JSON is split out when the string representation is requested.

How to do it...

The following steps will show some examples of using JsonBuilder.

  1. Let's start right away with a simple script that builds the representation of a fictional customer:

    import groovy.json.JsonBuilder
    
    def builder = new JsonBuilder()
    builder.customer {
      name 'John'
      lastName 'Appleseed'
      address {
        streetName 'Gordon street'
        city 'Philadelphia'
        houseNumber 20
      }
    }
    println builder.toPrettyString()
  2. The output of the previous script yields:

    {
      "customer": {
      "name": "John",
      "lastName": "Appleseed",
      "address": {
    ...